Notes on politics & history ;

GIFT OF
MICHAEL REESE

NOTES ON POLITICS AND HISTORY

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NOTES

ON

POLITICS & HISTORY

A UNIVERSITY ADDRESS

BY

VISCOUNT MORLEY, O.M.

CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1914

COPYRIGHT

First Edition 1913
Reprinted 1914

NOTE

THESE pages are a version, amplified and recast, of
an Address delivered by the writer as Chancellor
of the University of Manchester, in the summer of
1912. The strict rules that limit the contents of
a Bill in parliament by its Title, would be fatal
to an academic address like this. I only hope
that my Notes are not too dispersive to prevent
some points of thought from being of use in the
way of suggestion, interrogatory, and perhaps as
spur to curiosity.

M.

285549

NOTES ON POLITICS AND HISTOKY

WHEN I had the pleasure of coming among you a um
few months ago, I offered some remarks upon the politick
obvious truth that democracy in the discussions mmd.°f
of the day means government working directly l
through public opinion ; and upon the equally
urgent importance of a body, like this University,
making it one part of its office to help in forming
those habits of mind and temper upon which,
along with knowledge of the right facts, the sound-
ness of opinion depends.

To-night I propose (to harp upon the same
string,) and to say something about politics and
history. I intend a double subject with a single
object. I need your indulgence, for of history
I know too little, and of politics some of you may
think I know too much, and know it wrong.
Pretty manifest roots of mischief easily spoil both
contemporary politician and historian ; both the
minister or the elector of to-day, and the interpreter
of days long ago. Looseness of mind is one ;

1 B

2 POLITICS AND HISTORY

- narrowness of vision is another. Plenty of
infirmities besides are left. You know the worst
of them, at least by distant report — indolence,
impatience, procrastination, incoherence, pugnacity.
I include pugnacity among defects, for it is no vice
of intellect if our first attitude towards new opinion
is one of readiness and attentive response, rather
11 than instantaneous combat ; to give a hearing,
before rushing to controversial fire-arms. A recep-
tive mind is after all no hindrance to firm love of
truth. On the other hand life is short, and there
are limits to patience with quackish fungoids. You
have not, I would fain believe, forgotten the spirit
of a passage from Spinoza that I quoted here last
time : " When I applied my mind to politics, so that
I might examine what belongs to politics, with the
same precision of mind as we use for mathematics,
I have taken my best pains not to laugh at the
actions of mankind, not to groan over them, not
to be angry with them, but to understand them."
By understanding them, he says, he means looking
at all the motives of human feeling, — love, hatred,
envy, ambition, pity, — not as vices of human
x nature, but as properties belonging to it, just as

heat, cold, storm, thunder belong to air and sky.
signs of So much to begin with — the mood and temper :
then the application and occasion. Any re-
flective observer, if he likes, can sketch some of
the signs of the times in rather formidable outline.

POLITICS AND HISTOKY 3

Let us look at it. Political power is described as
lying in the hands of a vast and mobile electorate,

/ with scanty regard for tradition or history. What
is history to me ? asks the plain busy man. Demo-
cracy, they warn us, is going to insist on writing
its own programme. The structure of executive
organs and machinery is undergoing half-hidden
but profound alterations. The two Houses of our
Parliament are being fundamentally transformed
before our eyes. The Cabinet, keystone of the
arch, in size and in prerogative is not altogether
safe against invasion. The great wholesome system
of party is said to be melting into groups and
coalitions. The growth of special interests, each

/ claiming for itself a representative Minister in the
Cabinet, has turned it into a noun of multitude
indeed, and a noun not wholly favourable to that
concentrated deliberation which was possible when
Pitt had first six, then seven colleagues, Peel twelve,
and Gladstone fourteen. To-day we are a score.

A body of professional experts is now united to committee
a selected body of ministers, to shape conclusions Defence,
in the sphere of military defence, and therefore of
expenditure ; and such conclusions, though nomin-
ally advisory or for information only, naturally
carry a weight that cannot but affect the judgment
and responsibility of a Cabinet. The appearance,
moreover, of a leader of Opposition in this important
committee seems to point to the neutralisation both

4 POLITICS AND HISTORY

• of military and foreign affairs (for each of these
must necessarily depend upon the other), and to
their withdrawal from the field of party contention.
This would not be the first instance in our history
of a vast slow silent disguised transformation in the
constitution of the empire, without either embodi-
ment in any single instrument, or any coherent and
systematic transaction. Everybody knows, though
nobody has ever exactly comprehended, the famous
plan of Sir William Temple in the time of Charles II.
Ingenious observers may trace, if they like, a sort of
return to Temple's scheme in what they take to be
the slow re-modelling of our cabinet system, turning
it into a species of supreme imperial senate, but
always owing its existence to a majority of the
House of Commons — a vital condition entirely
f alien to Temple's age and mind. Another important
element cannot be left out of even the barest
summary. Self-governing commonwealths over the
seas are making initial claims for a direct voice in
the control of imperial affairs. The most recent
move in this direction — the adjustment of naval
contribution — has not so far been decisive.
National More than all this alteration in machinery, are
sphere and signs of change in national atmosphere. These, we
ter' have good reason to hope, may be only superficial
and transient, for nothing is more certain than that
in a survey of the modern world, national character
is slowest of all things to alter in its roots. Mean-

POLITICS AND HISTORY 5

while, we discover a shaken attitude towards law
as law ; a decline in reverence for institutions as
institutions ; a latter-day antinomianism. Even
powerful lawyers use language that treats a statute
as a cobweb ; and sealed agreements by great in-
dustrial organizations, are sometimes no better than
ropes of sand. Nor is the change peculiar to
England. American citizens of a reflective turn
sometimes tell us of the same thing even there. If
we remember, for instance, that administration of
law is the keystone of all civilized government, it is
startling to hear American statesmen who have
held posts of supreme responsibility, passionately
denouncing the administration of criminal law as a
disgrace to their country, and declaring the English
system of judges appointed for life to be better than
their system of elected judges. Or else on the other
hand they demand appeal to a popular referendum
against decisions of State Courts on constitutional
issues, and are for cashiering the judges who made
them — in either case shattering the foundations of
the judicial fabric. Weakened confidence in our
parliament would be formidable, but confidence
destroyed in courts of justice would be taking out
the linch-pin. Yet it would not be at all true to
say that sense of political curiosity, interest, and
obligation has declined. The case is just the
opposite. Political obligation as tested by the
numbers who take part at elections is in fact

6 POLITICS AND HISTORY

stronger rather than weaker, and sense of social
duty, which is not by any means the same thing as
political obligation, has vastly grown alike in
strength and range.

May I, without peril, here add another engrossing
element in the political landscape ? You have all
heard how, just before the revolutionary storm
broke over France in 1789, Sieve's published one of
the most effective pamphlets ever written : its title
was this : " What is the Third Estate ? Every-
thing. What has it been in politics until now ?
Nothing. What does it ask ? To become something."
A good critic of to-day warns us that behind the
third estate, behind the fourth estate, a fifth estate
has risen, with which we have to count. " Women
who were nothing, and who rather claim to be
everything, to-morrow are going to be something." :
some People capable of serious rumination will ask

sociT° themselves, what is the precise connection, if any
connection at all, between the embarrassing changes
of the hour, and, say, five profound changes in our
scheme of national life and thought within the last
fifty years ? Such changes are these. Predominant
political power has been transferred from a landed
and hereditary aristocracy and the middle class to
the nation as a whole. A system of compulsory
education has been spread over the length and
breadth of the land. Old ecclesiastical pretensions

1 Faguet, Prob. Pol xvi.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 7

have vanished, and a singular elasticity is working its
way into the forms, symbols, and standards of theo-
logical creed. Science and the scientific spirit have,
for the time at least, mounted into the thrones of
literature and art. Finally, the whole conception of
the State has been enormously extended. The exer-
tion of all the powers and duties of a State is every
day more and more insistently demanded. One
result of this last advance concerns that change in
the cabinet system to which I have already referred,
for it means extension of departmental labour for
the minister, and this makes the task of miscellane-
ous deliberation all the more arduous or impossible.
Nothing is easier than to make a crisis out of close

. . , observation

this signal conjuncture ot interesting, perplexing, the
and exciting circumstance. Still the long experi- Of
ence of our national history shows it safest, wisest,
soundest, in respect of all English-speaking com-
munities, to be in no hurry to believe that, in John
Bunyan's pithy phrase, " passion will have all
things now." Let us pray to be delivered from
exaggeration, and to have vouchsafed to us that
cautious sense of proportion, which is one of the
main differences between a wise man and a foolish.
Above all, how well it would be for everybody, if
you who have a share in the moulding of the future
in your hands, would write on the tablets of your
minds the words of a man who first brought scientific
method effectively to bear on social problems. The

8 POLITICS AND HISTORY

present writer, said Malthus of himself, is in no

.. temper to find plans for the future improvement of

society visionary. " But he has not acquired that

command over his understanding which would

enable him to believe what he wishes, without

\ evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might

be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence."

This is the temper that we may expect to see grow

up and spread in universities.

value of Our present case, as to social cause and effect,
ethos.™ } offers tempting material for high party dispute,
and sectarian recrimination and reproach, but
nothing is to be gained on that line here to-night.
An important observer of our own day looks for
progress to a social force, new in magnitude if not
in kind, described by him as the modern alliance
between pure science and industry.1 How far
this new force will go may be dubious, but what-
ever strength it has, must be centred in these
great teaching corporations. They must be its
main organs. It is their ethos, their inner genius,
that must, apart from the instruction they provide,
lead and sustain us in the march.

Universities have been boldly ranked by com-
petent historians with trial by jury and parliaments,
among leading institutions of the Middle Ages. At
any rate in England the power of universities and the

1 Decadence. Sidgwick Memorial Lecture. By A. J. Balfour.
1908.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 9

public schools that feed them, has been immeasur-
able in the working of other institutions. They
have been main agents in moulding both our secular
and ecclesiastical politics. They have worked too
often for darkness as well as light. Too often and
too long have they been the mirror of stolid pre-
judices and childish conventions ; the appendages
of old social form and institution, rather than great
luminaries dispensing knowledge, and kindling that
ardent love of new truth for which youth is the
irrevocable season. Power of this high dimension
is not likely to be missing in our new universities,
though its forms are undergoing rapid revolution.
Well was it said, " C'est toujours le beau monde qui
gouverne le monde." That is still a great deal more
true than people think, even in countries like our
own where aristocratic polity has in large degree
gone down. But the privileges of the fine world
of social class must yield henceforth to the forces
that shape temper, judgment, and range of public
interest, in educational centres such as yours.

The infusion of their thought and temper is what
will impart its colour to the general discussion.
It will reduce the number of those who think
they have opinions, when in truth they have not.
Universities, besides imparting special knowledge,
are meant for reason's refuge and its fortress.
The standing enemies of reason, in spite of new
weapons, altered symbols, changing masks, are what

10 POLITICS AND HISTORY

they have always been everywhere. I will spare
you the catalogue of man's infirmities, of which I
said enough when I began. It is both pleasanter
and sounder to turn our eyes the other way, to
man's strength, and not his weakness — towards
equity, candour, diligence, application, charity,
disinterestedness for public ends, courage without
presumption, and all the other rare things that are
inscribed in epitaphs on men of whom kind friends
thought well. Wide and stirring is the field.

There is no unkindness, and there is useful
truth, especially under popular governments, in
pressing people to realize the whole bearings of the
commonplace, that time and mutations of political
atmosphere are incessantly attaching a different
significance to the same ideas and the same words.
We are so apt to go on with our manful battles as
if the flags and banners and vehement catchwords
all stood for old causes. This is only one side of all
the changing aspects of the time. I ventured to
speak of narrowness of vision. The vision would
indeed be narrow, that overlooked the reaction
on our own affairs of circumstances outside — the
new map of Europe, the shifting balances of
fighting strength, Hague tribunals, tariffs, the
Panama Canal, strange currents racing in full
blast through the rolling worlds of white men,
black men, brown men, yellow men.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 11

II

The most dogmatic agree that truth is pro-
digiously hard to find. Yet what rouses intenser r<
anger than balanced opinion ? It would be the
ruin of the morning paper. It takes fire out of
conversation. It may destroy the chance of a seat
in the Cabinet, and, if you are not adroit, may
weary constituents. The reason is simple. For
action, for getting things done, the balanced
opinion is of little avail or no avail at all. " He
that leaveth nothing to chance," said the shrewd
Halifax, " will do few things ill, but he will do
very few things." As King Solomon put it, " He
that considereth the wind shall not sow, and he
that looketh to the clouds shall not reap." Modera-
tion is sometimes only a fine name for indecision.
The partisan temperament is no gift in a judge, and
it is well for everybody to see that most questions
have two sides, though it is a pity in a practical world
never to be sure which side is right, and to remain
as " a cake that is not turned." You even need
the men of heroic stamp with whom " a hundred
thousand facts do not prevail against one idea."
Nations are lucky when the victorious idea happens
to have at its back three or four facts that weigh
more than the hundred thousand put together.
Some well-trained observers find history abounding

12 POLITICS AND HISTORY

in volcanic outbreaks of fire and flame, seeming
only to leave behind hardened lava and frozen
mud. Only too true. Only too familiar is the
exaggerated and mis-shapen rationalism that shuts
out imagination, distrusts all sentiment, despises
tradition, and makes short work alike of the past,
and of anything like collective or united faith and
belief in the present. But to be over-impatient
with what may prove by and bye to be fertilizing
Nile floods, is pure foolishness. They will subside,
and a harvest well worth saving remain for the
hand of the reaper.
Generous Ardent spirits have common faults in an expect-

illusion *

and the ant age. We know them all. They are so apt to
struggle, begin where they should end. Pierced by thought
of the ills in the world around them, they are over-
whelmed by a noble impatience to remove, to lessen,
to abate. Before they have set sail, they insist
that they already see some new planet swimming
into their ken, they already touch the promised land.
«• An abstract a priori notion, formed independently of
experience, independently of evidence, is straight-
way clothed with all the sanctity of absolute
principle. Generous aspiration, exalted enthusiasm,
is made to do duty for reasoned scrutiny. They
seize every fact or circumstance that makes their
way, they are blind to every other. Inflexible pre-
conceptions hold the helm. They exaggerate.
Their sense of proportion is bad.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 13

If party politicians are with us, they will observe,
that in this place to-night I am bound to carry
political impartiality to the point of passion, and
they will not quarrel with me for saying that such
vices of political method as I have hinted at — the
substitution of generous illusion for cool induction —
are just as common among glowing conservatives as
among glowing liberals. Nobody in any camp will
quarrel with the view that one of the urgent needs
of to-day is a constant attempt to systematize
political thoughts, and to bring ideals into closer
touch with fact. There can be no reason why that
should turn brave and hopeful men into narrow,
dry, or cold-hearted. The French Kevolution has
not realized its ideals. But then no more has the
Reformation. Even as to Christianity itself, one of
the most famous sayings of the eighteenth century
—that " Christianity had been tried and failed, the
religion of Christ remained to be tried," — is not even
now quite out of date. In a thousand forms, the
Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, be-
tween Good and Better, persists. About one-third
of the inhabitants of our planet are Christian, — the
adherents of the Roman Communion being put at
240 millions, the Protestant Communions at 150,
the Greek Church at 100 millions. The Jews, only
10 millions, — lowest in number, but possessing a
vast effective power of various kinds in the politics
of Europe. The relation of creeds to new phases of

14 POLITICS AND HISTORY

social idealism must break into cardinal issues,
and light may be thrown upon the interesting
question what proportion of the ideas that men
live with and live upon, are held open to discussion
in their minds, and how many of them are inexor-
able and sacrosanct. There is good promise that
the common temper of willingness to try all things,
and hold fast that which is good, will prevail.1
Misuse of It will do us no harm to digest a sobering
mlhTroot thought from Locke : "If any one shall wTell
fusion. consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes
and confusion, that are spread in the world by an
ill use of words, he will find some reason to doubt
whether language, as it has been employed, has
contributed more to the improvement or hindrance
of knowledge among mankind." Dismal as this
may be at any time, how especially perturbing to
people with such questions before them, as we are
called upon to face to-day. Now, if ever, what
mistakes and confusion are likely to follow an
ill use of political words, and of the ideas that
words stand for. What would become of a lawyer
in the Courts who argued his cases with the
looseness in point and language, the disregard of
apt precedents, the slack concatenation of premiss
and conclusion, the readiness to take one authority

1 For a remarkable consideration of Religion in respect of Politics,
see Lord Hugh Cecil's little volume, Conservatism (Williams and
Norgate, 1912).

POLITICS AND HISTORY 15

for as good as another, — which even the best
of us so often find good enough for politics ?
Is there any other field where Bacon's hoary
idols of Theatre, Tribe, Market Place, and Cave,
keep such contented house together ? Five-and-
twenty centuries have passed since one great Greek
historian, perhaps casting a stone at another, re-
buked in famous words the ignorant carelessness
of mankind. " People do not distinguish ; without
a test they take things from one another : even on
things of their own day, not dulled in memory by
time, Hellenes are apt to be all wrong. So little
pains will most men take in search for truth : so
much more readily they turn to what comes first." 1

To these hints of mine an American newspaper An
supplied an apt illustration. The number of niustra-
questions, says the writer, now before the American
people, on which it is urgent that they should have
an intelligent opinion, is staggering. Take one of the
most intricate of them all, what to do with Trusts.
How are the masses going to know the precise legal
and financial effect of the decree of the court dissolv-
ing the Tobacco Trust ? They see eminent lawyers
radically differing. They hear politicians railing.
Nobody can seriously argue that the intricacies of
Trust repression and regulation can be mastered
by " the wisdom of the people." What the people

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S, Kal €7Tl TO, €TOl/Xtt /AttAAoV TpCTTOVTOU.

16 POLITICS AND HISTORY

can do is to form clear and strong convictions upon
the fundamental conceptions that underlie the
whole question. A sound public opinion can be
formed on the main questions, whether we should
try to maintain in trade and industry the possibility
of effective competition, or whether combination
and monopoly should be undertaken, controlled,
and supervised by the State. Get these essentials
settled, then legislative, executive, and tribunals
can find proper and effective form. Such is an
American case. It would be easy, though more
delicate, for us to find illustrations quite as apt
in the United Kingdom as in the United States.
Easy words The ideas and words that seem simplest turn
out most complex. If anybody doubts, ask him
to try his hand, say on Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity.1 He will be very lucky if, besides being
complex, he does not find their contents and applica-
tions directly self-contradictory. Of liberty, we
have been told on the best authority, there are two
hundred definitions. Yet, said Lincoln in their
war, " the world has never had a good definition of
' the word liberty, and the American people, just
now, are much in want of one. We all declare for
liberty ; but in using the same word we do not all
mean the same thing. We assume the word liberty

1 Any one who seeks to explore this all-important field, should
" not miss F. W. Maitland, Collected Papers, i. 1-161 ; nor Sir
- James Stephen's three little volumes, Home Sabbaticae (1892), full
of hard close thinking, needing answer and capable of answer.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 17

may mean for each man to do as he pleases with
himself, and the product of his labour ; while with
others the same word may mean for some men to
do as they please with other men, and the product of
other men's labour."

Then men will not soon forget Cavour's memor-
able formula " A free Church in a free State." What
could be simpler, what more direct, what more
pleasant and easy jingle to the politician's ear ? Yet
of what harsh and intractable discords was that
theme the prelude ? The erection of a kingdom of
Italy with Rome for its capital, was too momentous
an event to be comprised in one political formula. It
is no hallucination to describe it as the most import-
ant fact in European history for two centuries,1 that
is to say since the Peace of Westphalia. One aspect
of commanding significance these two supreme
landmarks present in common. Each sets the seal
upon a transmutation as memorable for States as
Churches : from each of them, the system and
relations between political authority and spiritual
emerge with changed foundations and renovated
ordering. The system of the middle age is over,
though ponderous links of the broken chain still
hang round the emancipated ruler's neck.

The most living and familiar of all the phrases Religious
in the controversy of our times is Religious Liberty :

1 Le Droit public et r Europe moderne. De la Guerronniere,
i. 332.

18 POLITICS AND HISTORY

in France and Italy a burning question ; in Ireland,
Scotland, and even England, by no means a mere
handful of dead historic ashes. Familiar as it is, the
designation covers entirely diverse meanings. Leo
XIII. found two of them in liberty of conscience :
one, liberty of the individual to follow God's com-
mands ; the other, freedom to prescribe the divine
precepts at his own discretion. Sometimes re-
ligious liberty stands for unfettered freedom in
uttering and advocating opinion on issues of
theology, — its foundations as recorded truth, its
interpretations of binding doctrine, its consistency,
or its complete and wholesale incompatibility, with
accepted standards and methods in the ever-ex-
tending area of positive knowledge and intrepid
criticism. Sometimes it designates the claim of a
religious body to impose upon faithful and volun-
tary members, what rules as to marriage, educa-
tion, congregation, and the rest, its commanding
ecclesiastics may choose, with no regard either to
surrounding social prepossessions, or to the con-
venience of the State. Is the principle of religious
liberty violated when the police forbid a Catholic
procession through the streets of Westminster ?
Or when a congregation of French monks or nuns
is sent packing ? Or when an English court of law,
as happened only a few years ago, pronounces null
and void a bequest to a society holding opinions
contrary to Christianity ? What of all the strenu-

POLITICS AND HISTORY 19

ous laws and unflinching executive acts in both
hemispheres, for a century and a half, against the
dreaded Society of Jesus ? Greeks and other
people in the seventh and eighth centuries, in their
struggle with imperial authority, were fond of using
religious watchwords that were really inspired by
political and racial resentments. And such mal-
practice has not even yet quitted highly civilized
communities not so remote from us as is Stamboul.
Still, we may fairly say that in our State at least,
within a single generation, a law of tolerance — not
indifference, not scepticism, not disbelief, but one
of those deep, silent transformations that make
history endurable — has really worked its way not
merely into our statutes and courts of justice, but
into manners, usage, and the common habits of
men's minds.

In the vast field of questions connected with Forms of

-n e rv • i Govern-

-borms of Government, terms in the commonest ment.
employment abound in confusion. Sir George
Lewis, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in
1857, and the most widely learned man that ever
held that office, wrote a little book on what he
styled the use and abuse of political terms.
He does not really carry things much further
than the primitive debate of the seven Persian
noblemen five centuries before Christ.1 The book
has little sap, but it puts useful posers as to the

1 Herodotus, iii.

20 POLITICS AND HISTORY

exact classification, for instance, of the varieties of
republic and monarchy. It is democracy where a
majority of adult males have direct legal influence
in the formation of the sovereign body. It is
aristocracy where this majority have no direct legal
influence. Is democracy a system in which the
many govern or, as Aristotle supposed, a system
in which the poor govern ? Is it enough to dis-
patch democracy as a system where the career
is open to the talents ? And so forth, with a
general suggestion of loose and inapplicable terms
being the links that chain men to unreasonable
practices. As if in fact, our incurable trick of
taking a word for a thing were not the root of half
Sociocracy.Hhe mischiefs of the world. A new term has gained
strong hold since Lewis's time, but Sociocracy, the
hybrid name sometimes given to our still dubious
accommodation between democratic expansion and
plutocracy, is not yet acclimatized. Our own
famous ruling assembly has been called the mother
of parliaments, and the congenial image justly stirs
our national pride. Yet differences in power and
the source of power between parent and progeny,
almost surpass resemblances. Take the House of
Commons itself. Even writers of the first rank
speak of its doings, and temper, and prerogative
during the war with the American Colonies, or the
, long war against Napoleon, as if the House of
Commons during either of those two momentous

POLITICS AND HISTORY 21

episodes was the same as the House of Commons
that rules over us to-day — that is to say was
chosen by the popular voice and national acclama-
tion, instead of being, as it was, the nominee of
a handful of a privileged order.

Then Aristocracy in England has been too Aristo-
essentially political, — and for other reasons, — to
stand out as pure caste. Even the vital caste-mark
of refusing commensality has broken down. It is
true that as a member of old standing in the House
of Lords said to a novice just come up from the
Commons, " You know, we are all like friends here/'
and in a social sense this may be true enough.
But let me remind you that what competent
observers justly describe as one of the greatest
improvements in public affairs ever proposed by any
government, — the change from royal and patrician
patronage in the Civil Service to open competition
— was carried in a cabinet of fifteen, of which
Mr. Gladstone said that no cabinet could have
been more aristocratically composed : only one
member of it did not belong to that class, and that
was himself. The case is taken by his biographer
as showing in how unique a degree that great man
combined profound democratic instinct with the
spirit of good government, — the instinct of popular
equality with the scientific spirit of the enlightened
administrator.

In all the vocabularies and catechisms of govern-

22 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Monarchy ment, no idea has fired such energy and devotion in
Republic, the human breast as the idolized name of Republic,
unless, to be sure, it may be the name and the idea
of Monarchy. In passionate enthusiasm, as well
as in cogent force of practical reason, Legitimist and
Republican have been many a time well matched.
Yet how profoundly diverse in essence, record, and
mechanism, the multiple systems that are labelled
by the common name of Republic. Cromwell was
dictator rather than republican. Venice was of
radically different type from Florence. The re-
public that emerged after the Swiss cantons had
thrown off the yoke of Austria, was in form and
foundation different from the Dutch system after
the overthrow of Spain. The first French Republic
was a very different structure from the second, and
the second from the third, and so are they both
from the United States of America. I need not
speak of the republics where in South America
Latin and Catholic civilization follows a strange
and devious course, and where republic means
no more as a form of government than is meant
by monarchy in the distracted Balkans.

Take the Legitimist, — a name invented for the
Bourbon line when the first Republic and first
Empire were swept away at Vienna in 1815. If
we are to understand by legitimate a government
that has acquired possession and authority on the
ground of acknowledged title through regular

POLITICS AND HISTORY 23

succession, treaties, or conquest recognized as legiti-
mate,— what of the European monarchies of to-day
satisfy legitimist standards ? In England, as we all
know, succession to the throne rests upon a revolu- -
tion, — the result of one of those political expedi-
encies that amount to a necessity, — though masters
of reasoned eloquence, from Burke to Macaulay,
have put upon it a saving face of continuous law
and order. In Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Norway,
the sovereign wears a revolutionary crown.

Even the consecrated name of Public Opinion, — Public''
queen of the world, as it has been so chivalrously
called — has many values. One constitutional
writer in whom learning has been by no means
fatal to wit — and neither law nor politics is without
considerable points of humour — puts it that the
opinion of Parliament is the opinion of yesterday,
and the opinion of judges is that of the day before
yesterday. That is, the judges go by precedent
and old canons of interpretation, while Parliament
makes laws, imposes taxes, regulates foreign rela-
tions, in response to movements outside.

In arguing for or against an institution, who
draws due distinctions between its formal and legal
character, and its actual work in practice ? Or
makes allowance for the spirit of those who carry it
on ? Or for the weight of its traditional associa-
tions ? In politics, is it the voice of the elector-
ate ? Are there any better grounds for regarding

24 POLITICS AND HISTORY

either a majority or a plurality of votes, than that
it is a good working political rule ? Does the rule
work well enough in general practice, to make
new expedients — Plebiscites, Referendums, and
the rest — pieces of supererogation, calculated to
shred away the concentrated force of a governing
representative assembly ? A very interesting writer
of our own time l emphasizes the non-rational
element in politics, — impulses, instinct, reaction.
Mr. Graham Wallas insists that the empirical
art of politics consists largely in the creation of
opinion by the deliberate exploitation of non-
conscious non-rational inference. This at least is
true that empirical practitioners find it hard to
forecast the decisive elements. The press is no safe
barometer. In at least three remarkable parlia-
mentary elections since 1874, the result has been an
immense surprise to those who had regarded only the
line of the most widely read journals in the most/
important areas : the journals went on one side,
the great majority of electors voted the other. Lord
Beaconsfield did not expect his sweeping repulse
in 1880. Of Palmerston it was said by Clarendon
that he mistook popular applause for real opinion.
Nothing is so hard, either to reckon or to identify.
The idealist is angry or despondent when he finds the
public deaf. Literary satire likens popular indiffer-
ence towards new ideas, to the dogs barking at a

1 Human Nature in Politics, by Graham Wallas, 1908.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 25

stranger. Or the satirist bethinks himself of the
ass who prefers a bundle of hay to a dozen gold
pieces. It would be easy to make a good case both
for the two honest animals and for the public, and
in truth the satire is idle. No doubt ripe judg-
ments and sensibly trained minds are not always
received with open arms. The hard and strenuous
pre-occupations of life naturally first bespeak the
common eye. But the ripe temper, if apt and
patient, slowly soaks its way, and well-stamped
coins find their currency. Representative govern-
ment exists to-day in a hundred different forms,
depending on a hundred differences in social state
and history, and nobody claims for public opinion
in all or any of them either sanctity or infallibility.
But to make a mock of it, is merely to quarrel with
human life. We all know the shortcomings in
political opinion and character — the fatal content-
ment with simple answers to complex questions ;
the readiness, as Hobbes put it, to turn against
x reason, if reason is against you ; violent over-
estimate of petty things ; vehement agitation one
day, reaction as vehement the other way the next ;
money freely laid on a flashing favourite this week,
deep curses on what has proved the wrong horse
the week after ; haste ; moral cowardice ; futility.
v But if anybody supposes that these mischiefs are
peculiar to parliaments or democracy, he must
be strangely ill-read in the annals of military

26 POLITICS AND HISTORY

despotism, absolute personal power, centralized
bureaucracy, exalted ceremonial courts.

in

To-day l as it happens, is the anniversary of the
Rousseau, birth of Rousseau a couple of hundred years ago.
In the French Chamber, on a proposal last week
to vote public money for its celebration, one side
argued that it was absurd to magnify the father
of anarchist theories, at a moment when police
were shooting down anarchist bandits in the
suburbs of Paris. The other side insisted that
Rousseau was the precursor of modern conceptions
of social justice, and achieved for all time decisive
and persistent influence over French, German,
Russian literature. A dozen books in political
literature — Grotius, On the Rights of War and
Peace (1625), for instance, and Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations (1776), — rank in history as
acts, not books. Whether a dozen or a hundred,
the Social Contract assuredly was one. The Institu-
tions of the Christian Religion, launched in Geneva
two centuries before Rousseau, was another. But
Calvin, the Protestant pontiff from France, was no
theorist as Rousseau was. The rock on which he
built his Church was his own unconquerable will and
unflinching power to meet occasion. This it was, not
merely doctrines and forms of theologic faith, that

1 July 12, 1912.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 27

have made him one of the commanding forces in the
annals of the world. Let us note in passing that our
fashionable idolatry of great States cannot blind us
to the cardinal fact that self-government, threatened
with death when Protestantism appeared upon the
stage, was saved by three small communities so
little imperial in scope and in ideals as Holland,
Switzerland, and Scotland. Taking Rousseau and
Calvin together, Geneva stands first of the three.

Burke scourged Rousseau's name and his work The test of
with an energy only less savage than his onslaught mind »
in the same page upon Charles II. He rejoiced a<
that Rousseau had none of the popularity here
that followed him over the continent of Europe.
Burke went on, as Wordsworth saw him, fore-
warning, denouncing, launching forth keen ridicule
against all systems built on abstract right, pro-
claiming the majesty of Institutes and Laws
hallowed by time, " with high disdain exploding
upstart theory." Yet Maine, the most eminent
English member of the Burkian school — I do not
forget Sir James Mackintosh — tells us that Rous-
seau, without learning, with few virtues, and with
no strength of character, has nevertheless stamped
himself ineffaceably on history by the force of a
vivid imagination and a genuine love for his fellow-
men, for which much will always have to be for-
given him. It was Bentham who so well put it, that
if you want to win mankind, you must make them

28 POLITICS AND HISTORY

% think you love them, and the best way to make
them think you love them, is to love them in reality.
Rousseau's idyll of the Savoyard Vicar that
fascinated the sensibilities of Europe, and struck a
new note in imagination and romance, came from
the same brain and heart as the political projectiles
that served the turn of Robespierre, and a host of
greater and better men. So the storm of a fresh
world-battle opened. In essence it was not new :
it was a re-adjustment to new occasion of thoughts
and schemes that were very old. The names
of Hobbes, Filmer, Sidney, Milton, Harrington,
are enough to recall the controversies upon the
roots of government and law, jus naturae, jus
gentium, and so forth, all over Europe, a century
before. The historian of political philosophy
takes us back to centuries earlier still. Tradition,
custom, usage, convention, established institutions
— History on one side, Law of Nature and Rights
of Man on the other. The feud reached not politics
only; it penetrated philosophy, art, letters, churches,
education, in countless forms ; for, we may be
sure, the same aspects and influences that strike
deep on politics, strike deep all round. Here is
the stamp of one of the great ages, whose alternation
and succession in history mark its lodestars, and
signalize its title to men's praise.

Man You know the electrifying sentence of Rousseau's

Social Contract : " Man is born free, and everywhere

POLITICS AND HISTORY 29

he is in chains. One supposes himself the master
of others, who is none the less for that more of a
slave than they are." We need take no pains in
our later days of Heredity as one of the established
laws of animal existence, to analyse the description
of man as born free ; and for that matter the idea
was older and played its part in writers older and
more respectable than Rousseau. It is nearer the
mark, so far at any rate as the civilized European
of to-day is concerned, to say that he is born two
¥ thousand years old. That is what history means
to our plain man, if he had time and patience
to meditate beyond the hour. And it is worth
observing as we pass the point of freedom,
that Rousseau himself insisted that everybody
should pledge himself to belief in the existence
of an omnipotent and beneficent divinity, in a life
to come where the just should be very happy, and
the wicked very miserable. To these and other
articles, he said, every citizen should adhere, not as
dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability.
If he broke away from them, a man should be
punished by exile or death, and rationalistic heads
were actually struck off in 1794, strictly and
avowedly on Rousseau's principle, just as Servetus
perished in flames that Calvin kindled, and Sir
Thomas^More's head was cut off by King Henry
VIII. If, however, the critic lets inconsistency
detain him, he is lost. Only let us add as a

30 POLITICS AND HISTORY

pendant to Rousseau's dictum, a no less bold and
much truer dictum, that man is born intolerant,
and of all ideas toleration would seem to be in the
general mind the very latest.
The It is easy for the judicious observer of a later

sower's

fortune day to riddle a book like the Social Contract with
son. shot and shell of logic, doctrine, figures, history ; just
as it was easy for Dr. Johnson to scold Gray's Elegy,
but none the less the poem remained an eternal
delight and solace for the hearts of wearied men.
More than one distinguished master of political and
legal philosophy in our own day and generation has
subjected it to searching analysis, of weight and
significance.1 But what matters more than logic,
or dialectic cut-and-thrust, is history, — relations of
present to past, leading antecedents, external forces,
incidents, and the long tale of consummating circum-
stance. How often do miscalculations in the states-
man, like narrowness and blunder in the historian,
spring from neglect of the pregnant and illuminating
truth that deeper than men's opinions are the senti-
/ ment and circumstances by which opinion is prede-
termined. ' What it is important for us to know
with respect to our own age, or every age, is not its
peculiar opinions, but the complex elements of that
moral feeling and character, in which as in their
congenial soil opinions grow." 2 In these words

1 E.g. BOsanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899.
2 Mark Pattison's Essays, i. 264.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 31

you have a truth, abounding in enrichment, power,
insight, and self-collection, for every patient student
of mankind, — such a student as in our better hours
of the diviner mind it is the business of us all to
try to be.

The power of a political book, then, depends on
aptness for occasion as occasions emerge. " What
wonderful things are events," cries somebody in
one of Disraeli's novels ; " the least are of greater
importance than the most sublime and compre-
hensive speculations ! " Too widely and fantastic-
ally said for cool philosophy, no doubt ; yet a fertile
truth for critics. Crop depends on soil as well as
seed. It is not abstract or absolute strength in
argument or conclusion, but the fact, half-accident,
of its happening to supply an exciting, impressive,
persuasive, attack or defence, or some set of formulae
that the passion, need, or curiosity of the hour
demands. Books, doctrines, ideas have been com-
pared to the flowers in a garden. JTis not always
the best argument that prevails, and the gardener
wins the prize who chooses his season right. How
much of their time do even good writers pass in
minting coin that has no currency. And in passing
from our glorious dome of printed books in the
British Museum, to the sepulchral monuments in
another department, we may sometimes think that
in vitality there is not much to choose between
books that once shook the world, and the mummies

32 POLITICS AND HISTORY

The event of Egyptian kings. No piece of literature ever had
more instant and wide - reaching power than
Chateaubriand's Genie du christianisme (1802). As
an argumentative apology it is counted worthless
even by those who most welcome its effect. A friend
told him that a picturesque stroke of memory from
his travels, a passionate phrase, a fine thought,
would win him more readers than a mountain of
Benedictine erudition. He took the hint, and his
historic knowledge is little better than decoration.
The Frenchmen who thought seriously about the
genius of Christianity, would have found more of
what they wanted in half-a-dozen sermons of
Bossuet or half-a-dozen pages of Pascal, not to
name Augustine or the Imitatio, than in all that
was to be found in the genius of Chateaubriand.
But then as it happened Bonaparte had just made
his Concordat with Pope Pius ; he had played his
part in solemn pomp at Notre Dame, once more
formally associating religion with the State ; he had
signed the peace with England at Amiens ; a rain-
bow for the moment shone on storm-driven skies
and the dark tribulations of men. No book was
ever happier in its time, but to neither book nor
influence could there be allotted length of days.

As with books, so with principles. Men, whether
as bodies or individuals, pick out as much from a
principle and its plainer corollaries, as convenience
and their purpose needs. The possible limitations

POLITICS AND HISTORY 33

of logical inference are widened or narrowed or Three great
thrust aside pointblank, just as actual necessity in history.
dictates. The best syllogism is swept down
by trumpet -blasts of Public Safety, Social Order,
and other fair names for a Reign of Terror.
A learned American judge found three great
instruments in human history — the Ten Com-
mandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the
Declaration of American Independence. This was
perhaps no more than a flash of obiter dictum, and
undoubtedly the bench exposed surface to a telling
cross-examination. Yet after all Mount Sinai, the
Mount in Galilee, and State-House Yard in Phila-
delphia hold commanding stations in the courses of
the sun. What we have to realize is the effulgence
with which hopeful words, glittering ideas, fervid
exhortations, and reforming instruments, burst upon
communities oppressed by wrong, sunk and sodden
in care, fired by passions of religion, race, liberty,
property — those eternal fields of mortal struggle.
Nothing is easier than to expose fallacies in the De-
claration of Independence. The point is that, as an
American historian records with truth, it was " the
genuine effusion of the soul of the country at the time."
Yet what a sound instinct for politics addressed
to Englishmen of the stamp of the American
Colonists, inspired Thomas Paine when he fired the
revolutionary train by the most influential political
piece that ever was composed, and called it by

D

34 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Oracles the wholesome, persuasive, and well- justified name
for thl6 , of Common Sense. Quarrels about the best form
of government, the balance of orders in the State,
even natural rights, were comparatively old stories.
Men are wont to use so much of such large oracular
deliverances as the moment asks. Moral issues, as
if almost by accident, suddenly take fire and set a
community in a blaze. Four score and seven years
passed, before a nobler President than Jefferson was
able to bring his country round to his faith, that if
\ slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Thus it is
not abstract books that thrive in the day of trouble
on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Who cares to
criticize the words in the famous Gettysburg speech
about a nation " conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal " ?
But it was, as Burke said, not on abstract
politics, but on the point of taxes, that the ablest
pens and most eloquent tongues have been exer-
cised, the stoutest spirits have acted and suffered.
, They took infinite pains to set up as a fundamental
* * , principle that in all monarchies the people must
in effect themselves mediately or immediately
possess the power of granting their own money, or
no shadow of liberty could subsist.1 Not that rates
and taxes are everything, or the tax-gatherer the
worst of our enemies. Of this, the most powerful
example was Burke himself. After his splendid

, l Speech on Conciliation, March 22, 1775.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 35

pieces on the contest with the American colonies,
which I still submit to you as the profoundest
manual of civil wisdom that our greatest literature
possesses, the storm that the colonial victory had
helped to gather, broke violently over monarch-
ical France. Burke, with marvellous prescience,
divined in detail the havoc that would follow ;
he became an oracle of the emigrant French
nobles on the Ehine, and inspirer of the cogent
pamphleteers like Gentz, who served or led Metter-
nich at Vienna. Not unjust rates and taxes, but
the overthrow of all the high historic common-
places, fired the Reflections and the Regicide Peace.
All the reactionary forces of Europe found the
voice they needed. Only, in seeking cause and
effect, let us not confuse the voice with the force.
Lamartine's story of the Girondins on the eve of
1848, Thiers' story of the first empire on the eve
of the second, Mrs. Stowe's picture of slavery, are
all books that suffused reason with passion, and
turned passion into tumult, but already in each
case the train was laid.

IV

Especially easy is it in the present state of our survival of

_. the Fittest.

own country and the world tor the most rudi-
mentary of political observers to realize how possible
it is, — nay, how inevitable, — for tremendous political
consequences to flow from books and speculations

36 POLITICS AND HISTORY

that seem to have nothing to do with politics.
Who can measure the influence on our contemporary
policies of Darwin and the other literature of
Survival of the Fittest ; and not only on practical
politics, but its decisive contributory influence
upon active and powerful schools of written
history ? It is no mere literary whim to count
Darwin and the prestige of Prince Bismarck, as
twin factors in the change of public temper from
the nineteenth century to the twentieth. On the
other hand, we should not forget how this passing
change on the great theatre of states and govern-
ment from a silver to a bronze age, has been accom-
panied by the spread, on a less resounding stage,
of an intenser humanity towards children, animals,
victims of cruel disease, men in prisons, black men
slaving in African jungles, and all else in need of
pity, succour, and common human-heartedness. It
has not all been blood and iron, nor has the rigour
of political or social logic prevailed unqualified.
So complex, subtle, and impenetrable, are the
filaments that secretly bind men's thoughts and
moods together.

The ruler As with books and principles, so with famous
acddenty actors on the historic stage. When Victor Hugo re-
turned from exile some forty years ago, even
competent men who did not much admire either
him or his art, felt and admitted that one whose
person was circled by the enthusiasm of three

POLITICS AND HISTORY 37

generations, must be possessed of qualities worthy
of exaltation and honour. Him, they said, who
knows how to awaken the noblest feelings and
impulses in men's breasts, whatever he may be
besides, — it is well that we should honour ; he is
the hearth at which the soul of the country is
kindled and kept alive. This diffusion of warm,
lofty, and stimulating interests may be better
worth the critic's attention than his book's specific
content. Hugo's glory was due as much to the
politician as to the poet, and that was the secret
of an immense renown, only to be compared with
Voltaire's ; with both, the pen was sword.

It was said to a great English statesman of our what does
day, " You have so lived and wrought as to keep the stand for!
soul alive in England." This is something, after all,
apart from the clauses of his Bills. It is a something
that may be almost as good as everything. To leave
out or lessen personality would be to turn the record
of social development into a void. The genius of
Comte produced a reasoned list of the heroes and
benefactors of mankind, of which it has been justly
said by the most eminent opponent of Comte's
constructive system, that a more comprehensive
and catholic sympathy and reverence towards
every kind of service to mankind is not to be met
with in any other thinker.1 A calendar without

1 The list is to be found in admirable form in the volume
edited by Mr. Frederic Harrison, The New Calendar of Great Men,

38 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Luther, Calvin, or Napoleon needs explanation,
but this was founded on his own elaborated and
peculiar estimate of positive contribution to the
well-being of human society. Each is connected
in place and work with the other. That is a very
different thing from the adoration of cloud-com-
pelling giants. It is very different, too, from that
attachment to the name and person of a teacher
and inspirer, which is one of the most beautiful
of all traits in human character. Select them
as you will, in whatever realm of thought,
action, or creation, whether from five hundred
or five, the first question, and in one sense the
last, is, What does your hero personify ? Nothing,
we may be sure, is more fatal than turning history
into idolatry. The hero-worship that Carlyle's
wayward genius made so popular in our generation,
too easily alike in history and in politics, falsifies
perspective. Unity of ideas and interests, it is
true, in a great man of lofty plan and power of
action, affect our imagination with something of
the symmetry and attraction of the grandest art-
drama, epic, symphony, the figures in the Medicean
chapel, the Sistine frescoes. But the standards of
art are bad guides in choosing political heroes. Of
Napoleon it was said by one who knew, that he was
all imagination : he created an imaginary Spain,

Biographies of the 558 Worthies of all Ages and Nations in the
Positivist Calendar. (Macmillan, 1902.)

POLITICS AND HISTORY 39

an imaginary England, an imaginary Catholicism,
imaginary finance, and imaginary France. And
Carlyle in time created an imaginary Napoleon
for hero-worship.

Unwelcome as it must be to many a deep
prepossession, we may as well realize that the
doctrine of " fortuitous variation/' in which
speculation finds the key to new species, has bear-
ings beyond biology. The commanding man in a
momentous day seems only to be the last accident
in a series ; the unaccountable possessor of skill,
talent, genius, will, vision, fitted to create or to
control emergencies, or to make revolutions in both
the machinery and commodities of life. " After
all," said Alexander I. of Russia to Madame de
Stael, " I am only a happy accident." Military
history shows in a hundred cases some odd turn of
chance,, fortune, wind and weather, unforeseen and
unforeseeable, on a given day deciding battle or
campaign. The greatest generals have been first
to own the blind jeopardies of their game, the
hazards when men play with the iron dice of
war. Last accident or first, — statesman, captain,
thinker, inventor, — the precipitating agent appears
fortuitous; comet, not great fixed star — the accident
of a peculiar individuality coinciding with oppor-
tunity or demand.

If any one should be scandalized by the proposi-
tion that the course of history can be deflected by

40 POLITICS AND HISTORY

an accident, or should find in it an impious flavour,
we should remember that both devout churchmen
and deep statesmen, the loftiest champions of
adherence to the profoundest pieties of life and
time, have been the first and most constant to
enlarge upon the impenetrable mysteriousness that
hangs about the origin, the course, the working
of human societies and their governing institutions.
When the Russian Czar, a mystic of the purest
water, called himself an accident, he meant no
more than a mystery, a power of inscrutable
source. Why should we be more shocked at the
fortuitous in affairs of government, than in the
appearance of the Bachs and Beethovens in music,
or Newton, or Watt, or any other of the originat-
ing luminaries in art, or science, or productive
invention ?
The Truly has it been said of the historic method, that

Historic J

Method, among other ot its vast influences, it reduces the
element of individual accident to its due pro-
portions ; it conceives of national character and
national circumstances as the creative forces that
they are. An ironical lawyer assures us that it
would be better to be convicted of petty larceny
than to be found wanting in " historic-minded-
ness." What is the historic method ? Its sway
is now universal in the field of social judgment and
investigation. It warns us that we cannot explain
or understand, without allowing for origins and the

POLITICS AND HISTORY 41

genetical side of the agents and conditions with
which we have all to deal. It substitutes for
dogmas deduced from abstract regions, search for
two things. The first, the correlation of leading
facts and social ideas with one another in a given
community at a given time. The second, the
evolution of order succeeding to order in common
beliefs, tastes, customs, diffusion of wealth, laws,
and all the arts of life. Stripped of formality, this
only expands the familiar truth that laws and
institutions are not made but grow, and what is
true of them is true of ideas, language, manners,
which are in effect their source and touchstone.
It is easy to see that the ascendancy of the
historic method has its drawbacks. Study of all
the successive stages in beliefs, institutions, laws,
forms of art, only too soon grows into a substitute
for direct criticism of all these things upon their
merits and in themselves. Inquiry what the event
actually was, vital and indispensable as that of
course must be, and what its significance and in-
terpretation, becomes secondary to inquiry how it
came about. Too exclusive attention to dynamic
aspects, weakens the energetic duties of the static.
More than one school thus deem the predominance
of historic-mindedness excessive. It means, they
truly say, in its very essence, veto of the absolute,
persistent substitution of the relative. Your
method is non-moral, like any other scientific

42 POLITICS AND HISTORY

instrument. So is Nature in one sense, red in tooth
and claw, only careful for survival of the strongest.
There is no more conscience in your comparative
history than there is in comparative anatomy.
You arrange ideals in classes and series, but a
classified ideal loses its vital spark and halo.
Every page abounds in ironies. Even figures of
high mark turn out political somnambulists. Talk
of " eternal political truths/' or " first principles of
government," has no meaning. Stated summarily,
is not your history one prolonged " becoming "
(fieri, werden), an endless sequence of action, re-
action, generation, destruction, renovation, " a
tale of sound and fury signifying nothing." All is
flux, said Heraclitus long centuries ago; no man
goes twice down the same stream ; new waters
are in constant flow ; they run down, they gather
again ; all is overflow and fall. Such argument as
this, I know, may be hard pressed, and it is in truth
a protest for the absolute that cannot be spared to
many active causes. But that relative tests and
standards are the keys both to real knowledge
of history, and to fair measure of its actors, is a
doctrine not likely to lose its hold.

Politics To-night is not the time for discussing whether

there is such a thing as political science. I need
not try, for the work has been incomparably well
done for our purposes in Sir Frederick Pollock's
short volume on the History of the Science of

POLITICS AND HISTORY 43

Politics. Is there any true analogy between the
body politic and the body natural ; are the methods
and processes of politics to be brought within
sight of the methods and processes of biology ?
The politician may borrow phrases from the
biologist, and talk of embryos, germs, organisms,
but surely those are right who insist that we have
not come near to the definite creation of an inductive
political science.1 That is certainly no reason why
the politician should not reason, nor why the
historian should not explore, with the methodical
energy, caution, conscience, candour, and deter-
mined love of truth, that marked Darwin and the
heroes of the natural sciences.

Political science suffers from the same defect as
political economy in the earlier part of the nine-
teenth century. There is a strange rarefaction
in its atmosphere. The abstract political man
wears the same artificial character as the abstract
man of the economist. He was usually supposed
by the French thinker of Voltaire's day to dwell in
China or Persia, or any other chosen land of which,
as it actually was, they knew nothing ; any more
than they knew of Canada when they ridiculed the
war between England and France as a struggle for
thousands of square miles of perpetual snow. We
know better now, but the standards of human
motive are still applied in arbitrary fashion to what

1 Maitland, Colkcted Papers, iii. 288.

44 POLITICS AND HISTORY

is distant in time or place. Ethical considera-
tions pass for so much ornament. Matters are too
much confined to description of political mechanics,
without regard to all the varieties of social fuel on
which the driving force depends. The changing
growth of new opinion, the effectiveness of political
institutions in giving expression to new opinion, are
treated as secondary, or not treated at all. The
lines laid down by Professor Dicey, in his book on
the relation between law and opinion in the nine-
teenth century, deserve to be followed, and they
are sure to be. The science so conceived will
realize that the value of political forms is to be
measured by what they do. They must express
and answer the mind and purposes of a State, in
their amplest bearings. I hope all this is not
ungrateful to a group of writers in this country,
who in the last few years have filled a really im-
portant bookshelf in any library pretending to
be on the highest level in this truly important
sphere — with Green, Pollock, Dicey, Hobhouse,
Bosanquet, Wallas, among them. Let nobody
suppose that speculations as to the State and its
various relations to the Individual are immaterial.
It is held that the attempts of certain French
teachers to present German theories of the State
in French dress, are directly responsible for Syndi-
calism in France.
Politics Politics, in the sense that I am suggesting, are

and law.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 45

different from law, because law tends to stereotype
thought by forcing it into fixed categories, but
political science, rightly handled, is for ever re-
opening these categories, to examine how they
answer to contemporary facts. Political science
is wider than law, because its work may be said
to begin where law ends. It is less wide than
sociology, because it starts from the assumption of
the State with all its rights, powers, and duties.

Germans have in Weltanschauung a word for A good
which I know of no English equivalent. The word.
French find no easier than do we, to convey it in
a single word or even in a free circumlocution.
It comes of the questions that haunt all ages, that
survive all philosophies, that defy continuous genera-
tions of chartered soothsayers, that mock rising and
sinking schools alike. Our literature possesses at
least one poetic presentation of its spirit, in the two
or three pages of inspiring prose that are the proem to
George Eliot's Romola. Technically meaning a con-
ception of the universe, Weltanschauung covers
a man's outlook upon the world and time and
human destinies ; the mental summary of experi-
ence, knowledge, duty, affections to his fellows ;
relations to mysterious Force and Will, call it
Providence, Moira, Fate, or by what name we choose,

46 POLITICS AND HISTORY

invisible but supreme. Such an outlook on the
world and its meanings, varies with each historic
age, and marks it for what it is. This is what,
if we seek the roots of social existence, distinguishes
one period of civilization from another. Men
in general are but vaguely conscious of Weltan-
schauung. For them, the World, in this wide com-
prehension of that commonest and most fluid of all
our daily words, is no object of their thoughts. Yet
all the time in some established creed, consecrated
form, or iron chain of silent habit, this is what fixes
vision, moulds judgment, inspires purpose, limits
acts, gives its shades, colour, and texture to common
language. Even for superior natures, narrow are
the windows of the mind ; no wide champaign, but
narrow and restricted are the confines of our
landscape.

Range of History, in the great conception of it, has often
landscape, been compared to a mountain chain seen far off in
a clear sky, where the peaks seem linked to one
another towards the higher crest of the group. An
ingenious and learned writer the other day amplified
this famous image, by speaking of a set of volcanic
islands heaving themselves out of the sea, at such
angles and distances that only to the eye of a bird,
and not to a sailor cruising among them, would
they appear as the heights of one and the same
submerged range. The sailor is the politician.
The historian, without prejudice to monographic

POLITICS AND HISTORY 47

exploration in intervening valleys and ascending
slopes, will covet the vision of the bird.

According to an instructive living scholar, here we
come upon the great contrast between ancient
history and modern. For right comprehension of
Thucydides, he says, " the fundamental conception
which all our thought about the world implies,
must be banished — the conception, namely, that
the whole course of events of every kind, human
or non-human, is one enormous concatenation of
causes and effects stretching forward and back into ,
infinite time, and spreading outwards over im-
measurable space. The world on which the Greek
looked out, presented no such spectacle as this.
Human affairs — the subject-matter of history-
were not to him a single strand in the illimitable web
of natural evolution ; their course was shaped solely
by one or both of two factors : immediate human
motives, and the will of gods and spirits, of Fortune
or of Fate." 1 All this is just as true of great
political historians like Machiavel and Guicciardini ;
they looked out upon the Europe of the fifteenth
century from the walls of Florence with Livy,
Tacitus, Sallust, for their only models. They had
the experience of intelligent travel, no doubt, and
that is the best of substitutes for patterns of written
history. Still the mighty commander of a later
age, himself Italian in stock, declared that Machia-

1 Thucydides Mythistoricus, by F. M. Cornford (1907), pp. 66-68.

48 POLITICS AND HISTORY

velli wrote about battles as a blind man might write
about colours.

So we might proceed through the " enormous
concatenation " of historical names and sweeping
change, that was never conceived nor compre-
hensible until it came to pass. Think, for example,
of the strange new spectacle of world and life
that opened to men's minds and shaped their
days, after the spiritual struggle between Catholic
and Protestant confessions. Heresies had been
abundant during the Ages of Faith, but wide dis-
turbance of simple unquestioning acceptance had
been rare and superficial. The protracted battle
over the authority of Rome, over toleration, over
church government by bishops, over rite and
symbol, had been fought out. The rival creeds
identified themselves with political forces, and had
become definite and commanding ingredients in
organized States. Only then did the purple vision
of human societies in western Europe, united by a
universal faith, begin to fade. The standing conflict
that henceforth divided Christianity, and divided
and subdivided Protestantism itself, by the mere
fact of its existence as a conflict, apart from its
merits and contents, extended, diverted, transformed
the outlook. Old worlds and systems disappear, new
arise, still men live but in a corner of their own.
The day of The temper of our present time is adverse to
tkm.ial generalization. Harnack says that in 1700 the most

POLITICS AND HISTORY 49

universal or encyclopaedic mind was Leibnitz, and in
1800 it was Goethe. I suppose Leonardo da Vinci
for 1500, and nobody would dispute that in 1600 it
was Bacon — the greatest intellect that ever com-
bined power in thought with responsible practice in
affairs of state. Court affairs at Weimar were
little more than playground politics. To whom
would competent authorities give the palm in
1900 ? If we are slow to answer, the reason is
that advance of specialization over the whole field
of knowledge has made the encyclopaedic mind an
anachronism. The day of the circumnavigator
is over — the men who strive to round the whole
sphere of mind, to complete the circuit of thought
and knowledge, and to touch at all the ports.
We may find comfort in the truth that though
excess of specialization is bad, to make sciolism
into a system is worse. In reading history it is
our common fault to take too short measure of the
event, to mistake some early scene in the play
as if it were the fifth act, and so conceive the plot
all amiss. The event is only comprehended in
its fullest dimensions, and for that the historic
recorder, like or unlike the actor before him, needs
insight and imagination, French Revolution
from Fall of the Bastille to Waterloo; English
Revolution from Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Oliver,
to Naseby, and from Naseby to William and Mary ;
American Union from the Philadelphia State House

E

50 POLITICS AND HISTORY

in 1776, to the Appomattox Court House in 1865 ;
Democratic Ordering in England from the Keform
Act of 1832 to the Parliament Act in 1911 ; Ireland
from the enfranchisement of the Koman Catholics
in 1793 — to some date still uncertain. How
desperately chimerical would the end of all these
immense transactions have seemed to men who
across long tracts of time had started them. They
are all political ; but the same observation would be
just as true of the world's march in the sphere of
ideas, methods, moral standards, religious creeds.
From All agree that we have no business to seek more

from the past than the very past itself. Nobody
disputes with Cicero when he asks, " Who does not
know that it is the first law of history, not to dare
a word that is false ? Next not to shrink from
a word that is true. No partiality, no grudge." *
Though nobody disputes the obvious answers, have
a majority of historical practitioners complied ?
To-day taste and fashion have for a season turned
away from the imposing tapestries of the literary
historian, in favour of the drab serge of research
among diplomatic archives, parish registers, private
muniments, and everything else so long as it is not
print. As Acton put it, the great historian now
takes his meals in the kitchen. Even here we are
not quite at our ease. Bismarck, reading a book of
superior calibre, once came upon a portrait of an

1 De Oral. ii. 15.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 51

eminent personage whom he had known well. Such
a man as is described here, he cried, never existed ;
and he went on in graphic strokes to paint the
sitter as he had actually found him. " It is not in
diplomatic materials, but in their life of every day
that you come to know men." So does a singularly
good judge warn us of the perils of archivial research. '
Nor can we forget the lament of the most learned
and laborious of all English historians of our time.
" I am beginning to think," said Freeman, " that
there is not, and never was any such thing as truth
in the world. At least I don't believe that any two
people ever give exactly the same account of any-
thing, even when they have seen it with their own
eyes, except when they copy from one another." 1
This is to bring some support for Goethe, that
" the only form of truth is poetry." The plethora
of printed books, moreover, has troubles of its
own ; it is consolatory to find an indefatigable
historic worker in Oxford to-day, allowing for
the weakness of the flesh, and protesting that
bibliographies are sometimes so enormous as to be
rather a nuisance than a help.

The unity of history is now orthodox doctrine, unity of
though accepted, as orthodox doctrines sometimes
are, in various senses. Freeman protested with
almost tiresome iteration against division between
ancient history and modern, and summed up in

1 Life and Letters, i. 238.

52 POLITICS AND HISTORY

the heroic assurance that history deals not with
the rivalry, " but the brotherhood of all periods
and all subjects, of all nations and languages, at
least within the pale of Aryan Europe." Acton
put it that " History derives its best virtue from
regions beyond the sphere of State." Mr. Gooch,
a younger student, says more fully : " No pre-
sentation of history can be adequate which neglects
the growths of the religious consciousness, of
literature, of the moral and physical sciences, of
art, of scholarship, of social life." A third view
is that profitable knowledge of history consists less
in remembering events or characters of statesmen,
than in knowing what men were like in bygone days,
their aims, hopes, pleasures, beliefs, and how they
thought and felt. There can be little doubt that
this would best hit the common taste. Treitschke
will not have it so. The farther a man places
himself away from the State, as he maintains, the
farther he goes from historic life. To bring descrip-
tions of the soul of a people into history, is to deal
with last year's snow. Who, he asks, does not feel
Culturgeschichte imperfect and unsatisfying, even
when handled by a master ? Even in Burckhardt's
famous book on theltalian Eenaissance, who does
not feel a want, the want of active personalities ?
History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the
presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen.
The essential things in the statesman are strength

POLITICS AND HISTORY 53

of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate
joy in the result.

It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine
as this lends a hand to the sinister school of
political historians, who insist that the event
is its own justification. Force and Eight are
one. Fact and reason, they contend, are and
must be one and the same : the real and the
rational are identic, and it is waste of time to
labour differences between them. The disciples
are thus led on to that exaltation of the State,
which stands for force, into supreme pre-eminence
as master-conception in men's minds and habits.
Of this strong meat, you will let me say something
later.

I have just quoted words about religious con- churches
sciousness, and regions beyond the sphere of State, realities.
How constantly have the immense phenomena
of churches, Catholic and Protestant, so imposing
and so penetrating, made the gravest chapter
in the history of States. As if Churches were
not political realities. As if the Council of
Constance in the fifteenth century, the Council of
Trent in the sixteenth, the Assembly of Divines in
the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster during the
civil wars, the Four Declarations of the French clergy
in 1682, — with all the array of pontiffs, church
princes, saints, doctors, congregations, presbyteries,
preachers, friars, inquisitors, missioners, creeds,

54 POLITICS AND HISTORY

symbols, bulls, canon laws, catechisms, — were not in
truth the very essence and mainspring of the vast
and subtle political commotions that for age after age
followed in their perpetual train. Is it mere distor-
tion to say that " hardly a more momentous resolu-
tion can be found in history " than the decision at
Nicaea in the fourth century ? l If it be right to
judge that no false system ever struck more
directly at the very life of Christianity than Arian-
ism, then the proscription of Arius and the triumph
of Athanasius was an infinitely more potent thing
in the history of Western mankind, than the
fall of the Bastille and all the principles of either
French or American Revolution.

It may, if anybody likes to have it so, be a good
distinction that Force is the principle of the
State, while the life and principle of a Church
is Belief. For that matter both Church and State
rest alike upon a shifting Tertium Quid of Authority,
— say, an infallible Pope or an impregnable Book.
The political affinities of religious and ecclesiastic
creeds offer to the historic student some of his
standing puzzles. How comes it, for example,
that the fatalism implied in Calvinistic Protestant-
ism has been the nurse of some of the most
strenuous, active, energetic, and independent
natures in political history ? There is many
another case of national temper and outward

1 Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, 43.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 55

circumstance bearing down the most stringent of
logical arguments.

Our own day offers a singular kaleidoscope. Men Political
thought it a crushing scandal in the sixteenth
century when Francis I. was suspected of making
terms for himself with the arch enemy of Christian
mankind, the Khalif of Turkey. Eichelieu, one of
the half-dozen sovereign names in the European
record, systematically worked with English and
Dutch against popish Spain for the same reason
that made him relentless against his own Huguenots,
namely, that they were the foes of monarchical
unity in France. The paradox is not absent
in our own time. We see Roman Catholic Austro-
Hungary the pledged confederate of what we are
assured by her own oracles is Protestant Prussia.
One third of Prussia, to be sure, is Catholic, but
Catholicism in standing contact with Protestant
culture and liberalized institutions, as the American
Union and our own Quebec are enough to show, is
not like the same communion in Latin systems.
Then the Sovereign who is head of the Church of
England, is the ally of non-Christian Japan. The
King-Emperor of India — the first European ruler
who has ever put on the crown in Asia — is
neutral and indifferent to the faiths and nearly
all the old consecrated practices of the myriads
of Hindus, Mahommedans, Parsees. Politics are
admittedly as if from the necessity of the thing,

56 POLITICS AND HISTORY

or privately for the sake of decency, supreme ; and,
it may be, whether men wish the process well or ill,
such events do more to dissolve dogma and sap its
hold, than any number of infidel books.
Religion Sympathy, again, in principles of government
Tn™ and forms of government, is treated as no more
to the point in settling the friendship of States,
than sympathy in theology. The balance of
power is supposed just now in the diplomatic
chanceries to be maintained in Europe, by firm
co-operation between a secularized Republic in
France, and an absolutist Monarchy that is half
theocracy in Russia. Ecclesiastical historians
themselves have taught us how constantly church
machinery has been used as a source of power for the
statesman's objects. They point to the war against
the Albigensians as having for its real purpose
the strengthening of French monarchy ; the per-
secutions in Bohemia, as designed to fortify German
dominion over the Czechs ; the Spanish Inquisition,
as set up and worked to overcome the disunion of
race and history, for the sake of the Spanish
monarchy. In these and an untold host of other
cases the State was Force, and Belief was not the
only point. If we must quantify, it has been said of
the long religious wars in France, that in one-fifth
of them religion was the cause, in four -fifths it
was only the pretext. To search for the secular
politician behind an army of spiritual crusaders

POLITICS AND HISTORY 57

is no cynicism. The enthusiasm, no doubt,
is the more attractive and exciting to reflective
minds. Yet policy, hidden or avowed, may be a
master-key.

According to some scientific historians 1 with History
a right to speak, history does not solve questions ; event.
it teaches us to examine. We often hear that our
understanding of history is spoiled by knowledge
of the event. A great event, they say, is seldom
fully understood by those who worked for it. Our
vision is surer about the past ; there we have the
whole ; we see the beginning and the end ; we dis-
tinguish essential from accessory; time fore-
shortens. To contemporaries events are confused,
obscured by passing accidents, mixed with all sorts
of foreign elements. Even men of the compass of
Caesar, William the Silent, Cromwell, Chatham,
pursued resolute general aims, subject only like all
men's aims to the uncounted traverses of fortune,
and to " leadings " that were half out of sight.
Both contemporaries and historians, more often
than they suppose, miss a vital point, because
they do not know the intuitive instinct that
often goes farther in the statesman's mind
than deliberate analysis or argument. A visitor
of Bismarck's once reminded him that Schopenhauer
used to sit with him at dinner every day in the

1 For instance, Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques,
Preface (1893).

58 POLITICS AND HISTORY

hotel at Frankfurt. " No, I had no business with
him, I had neither time nor inclination for philo-
sophy," said Bismarck, " and I know nothing of
Schopenhauer's system." It was summarily ex-
plained to him as vesting the primacy of the will
in self -consciousness. " I daresay that may be
all right," he said ; " for myself at least, I have
often noticed that my will had decided, before my
thinking was finished."1 Improvization has far
more to do in politics than historians or other
people think.
Dubious History's direct lessons are few, its specific

value of .

historic morals rare. To say this is not to disparage the
grand inspiration that present may draw from past,
or the priceless value of old examples of lofty
public deeds and magnanimous men. Plutarch's
Lives, parallels and all, are the master proof, one
of the too few books that can never be out of date.
Heine said that when he read Plutarch, he felt
a vehement impulse instantly to take post-horses
for Berlin, and turn a hero. This, however,
is a very different question. It is to working
statesmen that parallels may easily be a snare, and
ludicrous misapplications from Greece and Rome
inspired some of the worst aberrations both of the
French Revolution and of the Empire. The Old
Testament was often made to play the same part in
our own Rebellion. They are convenient to the

1 Lebenserinnerungen von Julius v. Eckhardt, ii. 122-3.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 59

politician. A plausible parallel makes him feel
surer of his ground. It is as refreshing as a broad
reflective digression in a close narrative. The
French Revolution is down to this day a favourite
armoury for parallels, predictions, warnings, even
nicknames ; and a harmless English politician
finds himself labelled Jacobin or Girondin, though
he really has no more in common with the French-
man than he has with Adam or Noah. We may
often think of Napoleon's dictum, that " there will
be no real peace in history, till the whole generation
contemporary with the French Revolution is ex-
tinct to the very last man," and even later. Mr.
Bryce holds that though usually interesting, and
often illuminating, what are called historian's
parallels, are often misleading. He tells how,
during the great dispute in 1876 after the Bulgarian
massacres, between those who thought we ought
to back the Sultan, and those who were equally
convinced the other way, he met one day in the
street an eminent historical professor, who was
fond of descanting on the value of history as a guide
to politics. They talked of the crisis in the East.
" I said, e Here is a fine opportunity for applying your
doctrines. Party politicians may be divided, but
no student of history can doubt which is the right
course for the Government to follow towards Russia
and the Turks.' ' Certainly,' he replied, f the
teachings of history are plain.' c You mean, of

60 POLITICS AND HISTORY

course/ I said, scenting some signs of disagree-
ment, ' that we ought to warn the Sultan that he is
wholly in the wrong, and can have no support from
us.' ' No, indeed,' rejoined my friend, ' I mean
just the opposite.' '

In truth, say what we will of the unity of history

and the identity in the elements of human nature,

the general body of two political cases is never

National exactly the same. Nations are not the same, their

idealsnever .-,,' . n ,.

the same, ideals are wide apart, their standing aims and pre-
occupations are different. It is inconceivable to
Englishmen and Germans and especially Scotsmen,
most idealist of all, that men should not care for
great industrial enterprises, persistent experiment,
wide mercantile adventure. They reproach the Latin
countries with lack of energy, and cannot under-
stand a French writer who says there is a commercial
industry and prosperity that his countrymen do
not envy, and actually suggests that those who are
alarmed, should ask themselves whether, after all,
poverty may not be for nations, what it has so
often been for individuals, the mark of the elect.1
So true is it that in more senses than one nations
do not use the same language. And what is
true of nations, applies just as aptly to historic
periods.

A good-natured international smile may be
forgiven at the ingenious parallel discovered by a

1 Sabatier, L' Orientation relig. de la France, p. 166.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 61

learned historian of Hellenism,1 between Macedonia
in the days of Alexander the Great, and Prussia
in the time of Prince Bismarck. The Greeks, it
seems, mastered by the spirit of the canton and
the city-state, thought nothing of their land as a
whole, until a barbarian from the north perceived
it, made "the synthesis of their civilization,"
and spread it over the world ; whereas if Demo-
sthenes had won the battle, a desperate state of
things would have survived. So if Sadowa and
Sedan had gone amiss, the resplendent orb of
German radiance and intellectual power would never
have broken through the nebulous skies of a dis-
united fatherland, and diffused its beams over the
civilized world. The same singular parallel finds still
more emphatic expression in that admirable man Germany

•i • i • ' • • T^.-IT -n t and France

and historic thinker, Dollmger. .bor once for- as rival
getting the serene truth that sovereign gifts of forces.ms
thought, imagination, discovery have not been quite
unequally distributed among the modern nations
of the Western world, Dollinger with strange
excess of emphasis insists that Germany is the
intellectual centre from which proceed the great
ideas that sway the world. She attracts all
thought within her scope, shapes it, and sends it
forth into the universe clothed with a power that
is her own. No other nation, he proceeds, can

1 Droysen, as cited in Guilland's UAllemagne nouvelle et ses
historiens, p. 191.

62 POLITICS AND HISTOEY

approach the German people in many-sidedness ;
no other possesses in so great a measure, side by
side with this power of adaptation, the qualities
of untiring research and original creative genius.
Out of all the nations of the modern world, the
German people are most " like the Greeks of old."
They " have been called to an intellectual priest-
hood, and to this high vocation they have done
no dishonour." l Greeks or not, nobody will deny
the magnificence of German contribution, though
much of that grand contribution in Germany,
as in Greece, is due to small States. And can we
escape an ironic start after all this, on encounter-
ing the proposition that " vanity is the accepted
characteristic of the French nation " ? The
force of the Macedonian parallel, whatever it
amounts to, is weakened, if it is not shattered,
by Mill's broad declaration that the ascendancy of
a ruder civilization, and the subjection by brute
strength of a superior civilization, is sheer mischief
to the human race, and one that civilized humanity
with one accord should rise in arms to prevent.
The absorption of Greece by Macedonia, he says,
was one of the greatest misfortunes that ever
happened to the world.2 So harshly may illustrious
philosophic oracles fall out of tune.

Leaving ancient history aside, I cannot but

1 Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, Eng. Trans. (1892), p. 205.
2 Representative Government, chap. xvi.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 63

recall the Macedonian Goethe's generous recognition Goethe on
of his debt to the supposed Graeculi of France ; contribu-
how he delighted in Diderot, and even translated
one of his famous dialogues, usually found far too
broad and tatterdemalion for English taste ; how he
admired the tone of good manners in French transla-
tion of his own books, due, as he supposes, to their
habit of thinking and speaking for a great public,
whereas in Germany, he says, " the writer speaks
as if he were alone, and you only hear a single
voice." In other words, French literature — and
literature, we should remember, differs from
Science as it does from Music — is so essentially
sociable. We know its masters in the seventeenth
century — Pascal, La Fontaine, Moliere, Bossuet,
Fenelon, de Sevigne, La Bruyere, Saint Simon.
We know the writers who stand for main currents
in the eighteenth— Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Encyclopaedists, Rousseau. In the nineteenth,
without ignoring the fame of Goethe, Schiller,
Heine, the French are not without some reason
for the vanity that is imputed to them. French
writers conspicuously engaged the attention of
mankind. They turned thought and interest and
curiosity and search for intellectual pleasure into
new channels. They led the great changes in mood,
standard, and point of view during the three
generations after Napoleon Bonaparte, and typified
ideals of an active and aspiring age. De Maistre

64 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Proudhon, Saint Simon (not the famous journalist
of Versailles, but the earliest name in the socialistic
ferment a hundred years ago), and Comte, unap-
proached by any of them in the power, originality,
and intellectual resource with which he wove to-
gether the strands of knowledge into the web of
social duty — were all effective writers as well as
fresh thinkers. There was Guizot, founder of new
historic schools, and one of those who by force
of personality apart from literary contribution
exercise a potent influence on their time, Renan
brought wide learning and infinite fascination of
form to a theological dissolution that science, and
the widening of men's minds by the widening of
the known world, made so inevitable. Victor
Hugo, amid a thousand colossal extravagances,
sounded to an enormous public all over the world
a rolling thunderblast against the barbarities
of recorded time, and was inspired by a
glorious muse, the genius of Pity. It would
be easy to vindicate a claim for other names,
mirrors of the strong movements or strange
phantasies of their age — and of human nature in
all ages — Michelet, Lamartine, George Sand,
Balzac, Taine.

The last of these shining names prompts a word
digression? °^ digression on a point in what I have already said
on the fortunes of books. Taine was a strenuous
worker and high-hearted man if ever man was. His

an

POLITICS AND HISTORY 65

six volumes on the French Ee volution, its ante-
cedents, and its sequel, are admirably attractive
as literature. But literary splendour did not
prevent it from being a marked case of the
fluctuations of men's verdicts on the causes and
significance of events, and the authority of their
interpreters. The book has enjoyed immense vogue
in Europe. It fell in with the reactionary mood
that followed the overthrow of the Second Empire,
and that desperate catastrophe, political and moral,
the Commune. Its claim to be history has been
almost painfully exposed by the more authentic
writer of another school. " The document does not
speak to Taine," says his critic ; " it is he who all
the time is speaking to the document." l

Every method has its own perils, and the perils
of Taine's method are plain. He tells us, Whether
the man be actor on the great stage of our world's
affairs, or an inspirer, creator, discoverer in the
realms of knowledge, truth, and beauty, character
and work flow from some master faculty within him,
in limits set by race, by surroundings, by the hour.
But then, alas, such unity is for art, and not for
history. As an achievement of literary ingenuity,
Taine's hundred pages upon Napoleon Bonaparte 2
are consummate. The elements are skilfully com-

1 Taine, Historien de la Rev. Franq. par M. Aulard, p. 326.
Faguet's Questions politiques (1903), pp. 2, 19.

2 Origines de la France contemporaine, Regime Moderne,
vol. i. chap. i.

P

66 POLITICS AND HISTOKY

pounded, the fusion in the furnace is perfect, the
molten stream runs truly into all the channels of
the mould, and a form of superhuman might is reared
upon its pedestal. This is not the way in which
things really happen. For that it is no wonder
that the critic takes down a volume of Cardinal
de Retz, with the stir and spirit of affairs in full
circulation, and the actors, as Retz says, " hot and
smoking " with violence and faction. Or he might
take some strong pages of Clarendon, Burnet,
Bolingbroke, Bacon, Halifax, Swift.

Let us repeat : sovereign gifts of brain and
national heart have not been so unequally distributed over
the western world, as fits of national vanity incline
men to suppose. One of the drawbacks to the
great uprising of the spirit of Nationality for a
century past, has been — I by no means say the
extinction, but — the changed hold, of the cosmo-
politan sense of human relations that sounded
a silver trumpet amid all the international piracies
of Silesia, Poland, and the rest. To this practical
declension of what has been called allegiance to
humanity, or the service of man, or over-ruling
altruism, one at any rate of the correctives is the
thought how in the glories of our common civiliza-
tion, each nation has its own particular share,
how marked the debt of all to each. How dis-
astrous would have been the gap if European
history had missed the cosmopolitan radiation of

POLITICS AND HISTORY 67

ideas from France ; or the poetry, art, science of
Italy; or the science, philosophy, music of Germany;
or the grave heroic types, the humour, the literary
force of Spain ; the creation of grand worlds in
thought, wisdom, knowledge, — the poetic beauty,
civil life, humane pity, — immortally associated
with the past of England in the western world's
illuminated scroll. It is not one tributary, but
the co-operation of all, that has fed the waters
and guided the currents of the main stream. We
may ponder some national trilogies or quartettes.
Descartes, Voltaire, Montaigne : Dante, Michel-
angelo, Galileo : Kant, Goethe, Beethoven :
Cervantes, Columbus,1 Las Casas : Hume, Scott,
Adam Smith, Burns : Erasmus, Grotius, Kem-
brandt : Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, Lincoln :
Shakespere, Newton, Gibbon, Darwin. Choose,
vary, amplify the catalogue, as we will and as
we must, no nation nor nationality counts alone
or paramount among the forces that have shaped
the world's elect, and shared in diffusing
central light and warmth among the children of

1 Elaborate attempts are made to show that the discoverer
of America was no Genoese, but a Jew from Spanish Galicia ;
and President Grevy even did so unfriendly an act as to grant a
decree authorizing a statue to him at Calvi in Corsica. Be all
this as it may, it was in Spain that the valiant adventurer pro-
duced his designs, and found the means of executing them.
Whether born at Pontevechio or Genoa, he struck such root in
Spain that he lost the Italian tongue, if it was ever his. The
controversies are exhaustively handled in Revue Critique, May 3,
1913.

68 POLITICS AND HISTORY

mankind. To deride patriotism marks im-
poverished blood, but to extol it as an ideal or an
impulse above truth and justice, at the cost of the
general interests of humanity, is far worse. Even
where men admit as much as this, it is wonderful
how easily a little angry shouting makes them
oblivious of its sanctity. For in spite of fair words
and noble and strenuous endeavour for peace by
rulers, statesmen, and most of those who have
the public ear in Europe, the scale of armament
reveals the unwelcome fact that we live in a
military age.

The Evolution, for reasons easily understood, is the

tongue as most overworked word in all the language of the
vernacular, hour. But we cannot do without it, and those are
right who say that in the evolution of politics
nothing has been more important than the successive
emergence into the practical life of States and
institutions, of such moral entities as Justice,
Freedom, Right. Of these glorious and sacred
aspirations in substantial form, history made the
English tongue their vernacular. Whether Burke in
his best pieces, or Aristotle in his Politics, shows the
wider knowledge of human nature, learned men do
not decide. At least the philosopher of small
city-states, even with the brain of an Aristotle,
could not be expected to have any idea of that
representative government which at home here is
the governing political fact of to-day, and in other

POLITICS AND HISTORY 69

lands is the political ideal. It was Locke in the
seventeenth century who in connection with the
settlement of the monarchy that we are decorously
adjured to call a revolution and not a rebellion, first
set out, as has been said, constitutional govern-
ment in terms of thought, and furnished the main-
spring of political philosophy for long ages after.1
Frederick the Great says that his illumination and
emancipation came from Locke, though we cannot
be sure that our careful and candid sage would
have found the career of his Prussian disciple a
pattern for princes. From him both Montesquieu
and Rousseau, the famous heads of two opposed
schools and rival methods, drew their inspiration.
Countless are the governing systems all over the
globe that have found their model here, and we
may record with no ignoble pride that the tongue of
our English masters of political wisdom is spoken
by 160 millions, as against 130 of German, 100 of
Russian, 70 of French,2 and 50 of Spanish. Mark
the change from Bacon, who sent his Advancement

1 Prof. Sorley in Camb. Hist, of Eng. Lit. viii.

2 Here is the estimate of a competent authority as to the English-
speaking population of the globe — over forty-five millions in the
United Kingdom ; about twelve millions in Canada and Australia ;
at least five millions in various parts of British Africa ; in India
1,672,000 literate in English, and rather less than half a million
whose English is vernacular, and it is the official language of
the annual Congress ; say a million in other British possessions.
If we take into account the various forms of pigeon English
spoken in British possessions and elsewhere, one might make the
total sixty-five millions. Finally, the modest addition of something
under 100 millions in the United States.

70 POLITICS AND HISTORY

of Learning to Prince Charles in a new Latin dress,
because a book could only live in the " general
language/' and English books cannot be " citizens
of the world." Cromwell as Protector could only
talk to ambassadors in dog-Latin. I do not
forget that among 90 or 100 millions of our
triumphant figure, the King's writ does not run ;
for these expanding millions live, not under our
bluff Union Jack, but under Stars and Stripes.
Still less can we forget that French is the most
oecumenical of all living tongues ; so sociable, so
exact, so refined, copious, and subtle, in its diversity
of shades in every field, grave and gay ; so apt alike
for what is trivial and frivolous, and for high affairs
of thought or business.

The only parallel to the boundless area of the
habitable globe conquered by our tongue, is held
by some to be Arabic. They tell us that though
Arabic in Islamic lands, for some three or four
centuries became the medium for an active propa-
gation of ideas, and though by the Koran it retains
its hold in its own area, and keeps in its literary as
distinct from its spoken form the stamp of thirteen
centuries ago, yet there is no real analogy or com-
parison with the diffusion of English. Latin is a
better analogy. It was spoken pretty early in the
towns of Spain, Gaul, Britain, and somewhat later
in the provinces on the Danube. In the East it
spread more slowly, but by the Antonines and

POLITICS AND HISTORY 71

onwards the use of Latin was pretty complete, even
in northern Africa. Greek was common through-
out the Empire as the language of commerce in the
fourth century. St. Augustine says, " Pains were
taken that the Imperial State should impose not
only its political yoke, but its own tongue, upon
the conquered peoples, per pacem societatis"
This is what is slowly coming to pass in India.
Though to-day only a handful, a million or so, of
the population use our language, yet English must
tend to spread from being the official tongue to be a
general unifying agent. Any Englishman who adds
to the glory of our language and letters, will deserve
Caesar's grand compliment to Cicero, declaring it a
better claim to a laurel crown to have advanced the
boundaries of Koman genius, than the boundaries
of Roman rule. Whether Caesar was sincere or
insincere, it is a noble truth for us as well as for old
Rome.

VI

From reflections on the contributions of great Nationalist

sentiment

nations to various aspects and phases of general changed to

i , political

civilization, it is no abrupt transier ot thought to idea.
turn to what is perhaps the most marked of all
the agitations of the nineteenth century, the
political movement for national autonomy. In
the sentiment of nationality there is nothing new.
It was one of the main keys of Luther's Reforma-

72 POLITICS AND HISTORY

tion. What is new is the transformation of the
sentiment into a political idea. Old history and
fresh politics worked a union that has grown into
an urgent and dominating force. Oppression,
intolerable economic disorder, governmental failure,
senseless wars, senseless ambitions, and the misery
that was their baleful fruit, quickened the instinct
of Nationality. First it inflamed visionaries, then
it grew potent with the multitudes, who thought
the foreigner the author of their wretchedness.
Thus Nationality went through all the stages. From
instinct it became idea ; from idea abstract prin-
ciple ; then fervid prepossession ; ending where it
is to-day, in dogma, whether accepted or evaded.
Partition A man who wishes to trace perplexities to their
source will not forget the history of the claims,
ambitions and pretensions of Prussia, Austria,
Russia, when they partitioned Poland 140 years ago.
Well did Burke in 1772 warn Europe that Poland
was only a breakfast for the great armed powers,
but where "would they dine ? " After all our love
of tranquillity," he exclaimed, " and all our ex-
pedients to preserve it, alas ! poor Peace ! " And
well does the historian to-day x declare, in a poig-
nant sentence, the partition of Poland might have
been a statesmanlike performance if it could have
stopped in 1772. " But history never does stop short,"
and in twenty years Europe found itself in the

1 Sorel, La Question d'Orient au XVIIIs Siecle (1878), p. 306.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 73

whirlpool of the French revolutionary wars that
came to a close at Waterloo. I have spoken of
senseless wars. It must be confessed that the
passion of Nationality has an ample share in most
of them for the last hundred and twenty years,
sometimes as cause, sometimes as pretext.

Among the glowing spirits who have been pillars Advent of
of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night — agents
in transforming abstract social idealism into violent
political demand, — after Kousseau in date, Mazzini
came. What the first was from the fall of the
Bastille in 1789 until Napoleon's rise in 1800,
this was Mazzini in the era after Waterloo. Each
was main inspirer of the commanding impulse of
an epoch, each the fervid apostle of a driving
principle. We need not overlook Fichte's Addresses
to Germany, or the splendid utterances of all the
passion and all the reason that broke forth in the
ever-memorable uprising against Napoleon in 1813.
Spain had been earlier in the same protest, and in
a struggle no less victorious. Poland was destined
to bear the banner of nationality for desperate
generation after generation, and Hungary shook
Western Europe with her story. But the Congress
of Vienna achieved a European settlement that set
nationality at defiance, and the despots whom the
national spirit had enabled to overthrow the great
French captain, instantly took in hand the extinc-
tion of all the light and sacred fire of that very

74 POLITICS AND HISTORY

spirit. It was this systematized defiance that
outraged his whole nature in Mazzini.

Without forgetting the splendid elevation of
Channing, most eloquent of American divines, in
the struggles for human freedom in northern
America, the Italian was in wider range than
politics the most fervid moral genius of his time.
No other man of his century ever united intense
political activity with such affluence of moral
thought and social feeling. Prophets have a right
to be unreasonable, and in many a page, as in acts
not a few, Mazzini goes beyond unreason into the
flagrantly irrational. Italian genius more char-
acteristically positive, practical, and supple than
Mazzini' s was needed for Italian objects. Yet it
was fortunate for them that his rare spirit had its
ascendancy. He was loud and over-loud against
those whom he chose to deride as the busy race
of jugglers, petty Machiavels of the antichamber,
trading politicians, ready in all countries to sw^ar
and to forswear, to launch out boldly or creep
ashore according to the wind. It is not such men
as these with their crooked ways, court intrigues,
and false doctrines of expediency, that will create
a people. Do not think that men of that sort
will ever rise to such a spiritual heat for the nation,
as shall carry forward a cause like this ; as will meet
all the oppositions that the devil and wicked men
can make. " Machiavelli," he cried, " has for long

POLITICS AND HISTORY 75

ages prevailed over Dante. To save Italy and
awaken the soul in Europe, you must return to that
immortal spring of a people's noblest aspirations."
With penetrating eye he was alive to the saving
truth of " Italy a Nation." His argument was inex-
orable. In other countries impatience of inequality The Italian

«. • i -i • . . i Prophet

and suffering had in 1848 driven men in search andgeo-
of a new order. In Italy twenty-five millions of ™0uScs.
men were rising for an idea ; what they sought was
a country. When they had conquered the foreigner,
freedom as well as independence would be won.
No aim but the creation of Italy, and Mazzini put
on his pamphlets an epigraph from Euclid, " The
right line is the shortest that can be drawn between
two points." No fallacy has ever wrought more
disastrous ravages. Euclid lived a good many
hundred years ago, but he must at any rate have
had too clear a head not to be aware that geometry
is not politics. ;c The papacy," again, "now no
more than a symbol for absolutist government, must
be dethroned. While the idol stands, its shadow
will cast darkness around ; priests, Jesuits, and
fanatics will shelter themselves beneath its shade to
disturb the world ; while it stands, discord will exist
between moral and material society, between right
and fact, between the present and the imminent
future." It is at least certain that Mazzini's
teaching was not merely the most direct attempt
to dethrone the temporal Pope and with him

76 POLITICS AND HISTORY

dogmatic and secularized Churches, but to set up a
new spiritual gospel in their place, and to light up
human life and public duty with new meaning.
Nation- As men with an instinct or a reasoned feeling for

ality as A ,

the revoiu- emancipation, even now turn over Mazzini s burning
secret. pages, in spite of pungent reflections that cannot
be suppressed on what would have come of it
all but for " political jugglers " like Cavour and
Napoleon III., and the guilty errors of expediency,
they may still find the passion of it irresistible.
How much more can we imagine the flame that it
kindled in the breast of generations to whom the
hideous dungeons of Naples, and all the other
abominations and degradations of foreign rule in
Italy, were cruel haunting spectres of their own
days. Nationality became the deepest and most
powerful of revolutionary secrets. Of the Empire
and the Papacy, the two wielders of the forces of
cohesion through the middle age, it is truly said
that they were neither national nor international,
but supra-national. On their decline, and for
other causes, nationality grew to be an unsuspected
sequel. Happily for the prophet, the time brought
a statesman. Four Italians played high parts in
modern history, and Cavour, endowed with the
union of force and brains that is named vilify, is
called as supple as Mazarin, as ingenious as Alberoni,
as intrepid and swift as Napoleon.

Though no term in politics is of more frequent

POLITICS AND HISTORY 77 .

use than Nation, it is not easy to define. There what is a
are almost as many accounts of it, as we have
found in other terms of the political dialect. John
Bright was thinking of kinder and humaner things
than definition, when he spoke his famous sentence
of such moving simplicity — the polar star of civilised
statesmen — that the nation in every country
dwells in the cottage. What constitutes a nation ;
what marks it from a Nationality, from a Society,
from a State ? The question is not idle or academic.
It generates active heat in senates and on platforms,
for example, at this moment, whether this or that
portion of our United Kingdom is either nation or
nationality. When the idea was mooted of France
seeking compensation after the Prussian victory at
Sadowa, important men denounced it as " blasphemy
against the principle of nationalities." Let us
theorise for a moment. Here is what the dictionary
has to tell us of a Nation : " An extensive aggregate
of persons, so closely associated with each other by
common descent, language, or history, as to form a
distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate
political state, and occupying a definite territory."
This is adequate enough, and consonant with usage.
But, then, Belgium is a political State and yet its
Walloon and Flemish provinces are not common
in descent, tongue, or history, and their dissidence
is at this very day something of an active issue.
Austro - Hungary is a great State, though they

78 POLITICS AND HISTORY

speak twenty-four languages in the Austrian army.
Another authority finds in usage, — quern penes
arbitrium est et jus et nor ma loquendi, — that " wher-
ever a community has both political independence
and a distinctive character recognisable in its
members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a
nation." For a test to be applied all over the
world, this is perhaps too vague. Freeman lays it
down in his own imperative way, that the question
what language they speak, goes further than any
other one question towards giving us an idea of
what we call the nationality of a people. We may
say, again, that the feeling of nationality is due
to identity of descent, common language, common
religion, common pride in past incidents. But no
single element in the list makes a decisive test.
Language will not answer the purpose ; for Switzer-
land has three languages, yet is one nation. In South
America there are two kindred languages ; mostly
common descent, common pride in their wresting
of independence . from Europe, common religious
faith. Yet there are sixteen communities more or
less entitled to the rank of nations, and the traveller
tells us there is no sense of a common Spanish-
American nationality. Is Nationality to be de-
cided by the political character of territory, or by
the people who inhabit it ? In older days the first
was the prevailing theory. The second prevails
to-day and is one of the marks of modern system,

POLITICS AND HISTORY 79

as we may discern in Balkan perplexities. Devo-
tion to a dynasty has made nations. So has
passion for a creed. So, perhaps, most of all, that
ingenita erga patriam caritas, the natural fondness
for the land where we are born.

The lineal descent of national stocks, through Ethnologic

,,..,, , . admixture.

dim ages with no sure or intelligible chronicler,
offers a boundless opening for ethnologic disputation.
Learned men maintain, for instance, and men no
less learned deny, that the Hellenic race in Europe
has been exterminated, and that the modern .
Greeks are a mixture of the descendants of Roman
slaves and Sclavonian colonists. Yet, however
this may be, the Greek name and all its glittering
associations, over the whole field of politics, ethics,
poetry, and art, seem enough to inspire nationality in
its most evident sense. The absorption by a popula-
tion of new modifying elements appears an obscure
and mysterious process. The problem is at this
day presenting itself on a truly colossal scale in
the United States, where the old floods of immigra-
tion from Ireland and Germany are now replenished
by swelling hosts from Southern and Central Europe,
Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Eussian Jews, and the
rest, changing both racial and religious proportions,
while the negro contingent, imported in the
old slave-holding days, though increasing at a
slower rate than the white, is still some 10 or 11 per
cent of the whole. Yet the political nationality of the

80 POLITICS AND HISTORY

United States, their high and strong self-conscious-
ness as a nation, is one of the supreme factors in the
modern world's affairs.

Spain and The resistance of Spain to Napoleon from 1808
to 1813 has been called the greatest European event
since the French Revolution ; it showed Europe
that a conqueror may shake a State to pieces, and
yet the nation hold together. The machinery
of the Spanish State was violently overthrown,
but common religious passion, the inheritance of
common language, ferocious common pride in
triumphant warfare for ten long centuries against
hated faith and blood, all awoke and maintained
in full blaze, on Napoleon's uncalculating provoca-
tion, those intense elements of national vitality in
relation to which the organized State is but
secondary. Tyrol, Moscow, Leipzig are names
for immortal chapters in the story of national
uprisings, that lent their new and overwhelming
force to the soldiers and rulers who worked the
political systems of the hour. It has been noted
as one of the curious ironies of history that it was
the victor of Marengo and Austerlitz who first since
the Lombard kingdom, a thousand years before,
established unity of government in the Italian
peninsula, and laid the foundations of modern
Italy.

Sicily has found a dwelling-place for many
nations, but as the most learned of our historians

POLITICS AND HISTORY 81

truly assures us, a Sicilian nation there has never
been. Europe, Asia, Africa have all met in the
great central island of the Mediterranean. Greek,
Punic, Koman, Mussulman, Christian, Saracen, Arab,
Norman, Spaniard, have all in strange turns been
ruling and subject inhabitants. Of the unity of
historical antecedents, supposed to be essential to
a nationality, there is little trace for a single decade
of Sicilian annals until 1859. Yet Sicily has played
a part of its own in the records of Nationality, from
the Sicilian Vespers in the thirteenth century down
to Garibaldi and Crispi in the nineteenth.

Let me venture on a parting observation as to National
Nationality. It has been on the whole a com-
manding and accepted impulse for our era. Yet
it has been contemporary with a current tendency
of equal strength, but directly opposite. One chief
mark of the same time has been the advance of
Science in all its branches and forms. But Science
works not at all for Nationality or its spirit. It
makes entirely for Cosmopolitanism. In multi-
farious congresses in every capital of the world
nationality is effaced. Parthians, Medes, Elamites,
meet on common terms, and liberty, equality, and
fraternity all prevail, without intermixture from
diplomatic sophistries. Science, besides all else
that it is and does, is the strongest unifying agent
of the time, especially if we include the inventions
that science makes possible, and the commerce that

G

82 POLITICS AND HISTORY

inventions stimulate and nourish. Even those who
are least disposed to share the common exultation
over the throng of new inventions due to new
scientific knowledge, may perceive that the respect
for scientific rules and methods which bring these
fresh conveniences to our doors, tends to spread
itself in the popular mind through the whole circle
of men's opinion, even in matters of daily talk and
life far remote from the atmosphere of science.
This respect marks the general advent and common
diffusion of a new intellectual force and spirit.

VII

Progress as Another question that I can here do little more
than note, has long had irresistible interest for
powerful minds. It could not be otherwise. Is the
track all upward ? That is not all. The question
strikes far deeper than merely social and political in-
terest. It goes to the very quick of modern interpre-
tation of the working of past history and our present
universe. There are, we may suppose, three explana-
tions, theories, or hypotheses of the course of human
things, and the power that guides them, shapes
them, and controls them. One assigns this supreme
mysterious control to Providence ; a second to laws
of Evolution ; a third to a beneficent and steadfast
necessity, in which we confidently trust under the
name of Progress. Such is the modern aspect of

POLITICS AND HISTORY 83

an eternal riddle, — far too momentous for us to
confront here. But you will let me offer one or
two remarks upon the divinity of Progress, in its
ordinary mundane acceptation. Progress, like
Toleration, or Equality, is one of the reigning
words most familiar in common use, yet having
extremely diverse significance. It stands for
a hundred different things. Whether we mean
advance in material civilization during historic time ;
or advance in the strength and wealth of human
nature ; or advance in ideals of human society — and
these are evidently neither identical nor always con-
temporary— causes are assumed to be constantly at
work, tending both to raise the high- water mark of
civilization, and to spread its various successive
gains over a wider level. Do you mean progress
in talents and strength of mind ? Clear thinkers
have declared that they find no reason to expect
it, and that there is as much of these, and often
more, in an ignorant than in a cultivated age.
But there is, they go on to say, great progress,
and great reason to expect progress, in feelings
and opinions.1 Close examination forces us to
be content with something far short of this
assumption. A universal law, for all times, a/11
States, all Societies, Progress is not. There is no
more interesting problem, for instance, in the
region of modern historic speculation, than the

1 Mill's tetters, ii. 359, '

84 POLITICS AND HISTORY

decline of the Latin race in the southern half of the
American hemisphere, contrasted with the boundless
advance both in material prosperity and mental
vigour of the English, Scotch, Irish, and French
stocks among their northern neighbours. Progress,
says one grave thinker, not over-stating a plain
historic truth, " is the rare exception ; races may
remain in the lowest barbarism, or their develop-
ment be arrested at some more advanced stage ;
actual decay may alternate with progress, and even
true progress implies some admixture of decay." l
An extraordinarily copious and impressive elabora-
tion of such a line of thought, is to be found in a
work of twenty years ago, on National Life and
Character, of which, whatever we may decide about
its central thesis as a forecast, we may say that it
opens, collects, expounds, and illustrates, vast issues
in the evolution of States and races, better worth
examining and thinking about, than can be found
in any other book of the same period.2
A modem From vast tracts and periods of literature, it is
almost startling to think that the idea of progress,
which is the animating force of so much of the
thought, writing, and action of the civilized world
to-day, is wholly absent. You only find glimpses
of it here and there among Greeks and Romans.
Early Christians could care little for a world which

1 Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the 18th Century, i. 17.

2 National Life and Character : a Forecast, by Charles H. Pearson,
1893.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 85

they regarded as doomed to extinction at a near
date. The thought of retrogression is constant.
Sages and poets in every age have warned States
and their rulers of the inevitable decay that
awaits them, as it awaits each mortal man
himself. In some who were most alive to the
decline in standards of life and government, there
burned a fervid hope that somehow declension
would be arrested, though the conditions that pro-
duced it were to be essentially unaltered. If the
past had been all wrong, what certainty of the same
agencies that had governed the past, being either
dispersed, or forced to prepare a future that should be
all right ? Bishop Berkeley, for example, the most
ardent philanthropist of his day, despaired of the dis-
tempered civilization of his country, and showed in
practice by missionary emigration to Rhode Island,
his faith, after the decay of Europe, in a golden age
and a new Fifth Empire in the American West—

The seat of innocence,

Where Nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense,

The pedantry of courts and schools.

He did not realise how many of the pedantic
elements would inevitably be transplanted, and how
many of the impediments to virtue, truth, and sense
would survive change of scene and clime. Even
for ourselves, authority is not all one way. Angles
and distances make all the difference to the eagles

86 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Modem and falcons who survey history. We know more
ments. and more of Nature in the world of matter ; we have
more power over its energies ; men have increased
and multiplied and spread out over the globe ;
life is longer ; vigour and endurance have waxed,
not waned. International law, though important
chapters are still to come, has made much way
since Grotius wrote one of the cardinal books in
European history. Forgive me for mentioning
what is at the moment a word of wrath. The
curse of industrial life is insecurity. The principle
of insurance applied to risks of every kind has
extended and ramified in a truly extraordinary
way during the last fifty years, until it is now
one of the subtlest international agencies, uniting
distant interests and creating perforce a thousand
mutual obligations. A portion of mankind has
access to higher standards of comfort and well-
being. For a thousand years, Michelet says,
Europe was unwashed. That at least is no longer
absolutely true. While these happy forward
motions please our eye and thought, they demon-
strate no determined law of social history. Tower-
ing States have vanished, like shooting stars.
Rome is not, in Byron's plangent line, the only
lone mother of dead empires. The desolation
of history at Paestum or Segesta, at Ephesus,
Olympia, Syracuse, is more awful than the sublime
desolation of nature in tracts of Alpine ice.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 87

You remember Gibbon's declaration that if a compara-
man were called to fix the period in the history of prosperity
the world during which the condition of the human anctent
race was most happy and prosperous, he would 61
without hesitation name the period between the
death of Domitian and the accession of Commodus.
It is nearly a century and a half since Gibbon
wrote. The trenchant historian of Home of our
own day and generation, with characteristic daring,
puts and answers the same question. "If an angel
of the Lord," Mommsen assures us, " were to strike
the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus
Antoninus was governed with the greater intel-
ligence and the greater humanity then or now,
whether civilization and general prosperity have
since then advanced or retrograded, it is very
doubtful whether the decision would favour the
present." That there is another side, everybody
knows. Slavery was the horrid base. Pagan
satirists and Christian apologists alike have drawn
dark pictures of the imperial world. From opposing
points, exaggeration of its wickedness was their
common cue. Long after the old stern and trium-
phant Rome had sunk, after the storm of barbaric
invasion had abated, after literature had been re-
covered, take an ensuing span of Italian history, what
was the progress ? Some of you may have come
across a vivid picture of the memorable sixteenth
century in Italy, drawn by Taine after reading

88 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Benvenuto Cellini, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari.
" This Italian society of the sixteenth century," he
says, in the literary undress of a private letter, " is
an assemblage of ferocious brutes with passionate
imagination. The footmen of to-day would not
endure the company of the Duke and Duchess of
Ferrari, of Paul III., Julius II., Borgia, etc. No
wit nor grace nor ease nor amiability, no gentleness,
no ideas, no philosophy. Pedantry, gross super-
stition, risk of death at every instant, the necessity
of fighting at every street corner for life or purse,
harlotry and worse than harlotry — all with a
crudity and a brutality beyond belief." And
learned modern inquirers, competent in wide
range of knowledge, insist that, difficult as it
must be to gauge the average morality of any
age, " it is questionable whether the average
morality of civilized ages has largely varied."
Evidence enough remains that there was in ancient
Rome, as in London or Manchester to-day, " a
preponderating mass of those who loved their
children and their homes, who were good neigh-
bours and faithful friends, who conscientiously
discharged their civil duties." l Even the Eastern
Roman Empire, that not many years ago was
usually dismissed with sharp contempt, is now
recovered to history, and many centuries in its

1 Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian
Church, p. 138.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 89

fluctuating phases are shown to have been epochs
of an established State, with well-devised laws
well administered, with commerce prosperously
managed, and social order conveniently worked
and maintained.

Mill puzzled us many years ago (1857) by what

seemed an audacious doubt. " Hitherto it is supersti-
tion.

questionable," he said, " if all the mechanical
inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil
of any human being. They have enabled a greater
population to live the same life of drudgery and
imprisonment, and an increased number to make
fortunes. But they have not yet begun to effect
those great changes in human destiny, which it is
in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish." l
This doubt, when quickened into fervid activity of
mixed pity and anger, by its clash with new ideals
of the human lot, has bred a fresh Socialism, the
immense perplexity of ruling men to-day. Whether
Socialism can be the assured key to progress, is still
a secret. Meanwhile, it is unjust to history to
overlook the strenuous efforts that have softened
the hardships incident to spread of mechanical
invention. The " drudgery and imprisonment " is
not what it was. Child labour has been abolished.
The labour of women is guarded. The hours of
men are reduced. I need not tell over again
all that beneficent tale ; it saved the nation.

1 Polit. Econ. ii. 326.

90 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Its full effects are still uncounted. Mill was
not afraid of an economically " stationary state,"
but then he appended the emphatic proviso that
the question of population should always be held
in due regard. He did not live to see a Europe
where the military rivalry of divided nations has
for the moment violently shifted that vital question
into unexpected bearings, because ratio of popu-
lation is one of the main elements in all computa-
tions of fighting strength. It is the recruiting
sergeant now holds the international scales.

The decrepitude that ended in the Latin con-
quest of Constantinople at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest
in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof
to the optimist superstition that civilized com-
munities are universally bound somehow or
another to be progressive. Whether that decrepi-
tude was due to Byzantine incompetence for work-
ing government on the vast imperial scale, or to the
misuse of intellectual energy in futile and exasperat-
ing polemics, or to the gross and crushing subjection
of spiritual power to temporal, — these are questions
of the first interest to all who seek philosophic
history. They are neighbours, too, to a wider
question that has no little actuality to-day. For
some observers, who know and have thought much
about it, pronounce it not clear that Western contact
with Eastern races will increase the sum of human

POLITICS AND HISTORY 91

happiness. And what of evolution among Eastern
races themselves ? From time to time attempts
are made by reforming Moslems to discover a basis
for " liberalism " in the Koran itself. Only a few
years ago, for example, was published an address
from Moslems in Tunis to a French official, earnestly
assuring him by an ingenious assortment of texts
that there was nothing in the Koran incompatible
in spirit, if not exactly in letter, with the immortal
" principles of '89." Thence they argue that just as
Christianity has passed through slavery, intolerance,
and degrading incidents connected with the seclusion
of women, so the religion of Mahomet may, like
Christianity, make its way into a higher and
purer air. That Islamism is a marked advance
for backward races is generally admitted, and
that it is not incompatible with solid intelligence
and all manly virtues we know. We hardly find in-
stances to-day on any marked scale of its capacity
to adapt itself to all the modern requirements
of a civilized State. Some observers, however,
hold a more sanguine view. Whether nation-
ality is likely to take the bond of religion in Moslem
countries, is another question not easy to answer.
There may be a tendency in that direction, and it
may be stimulated by the decline of Turkish power.1
After all, it is well to measure against the pro-

1 On these points, see Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 136-140 ;
Bryce's Studies in History and Jurisprudence, ii., Essay 13.

92 POLITICS AND HISTORY

cession of changes that have swept through culture,
civilization, and the modern world, some stupendous
fixities of human things. If we think, for example,
of all that Language means; of the unplumbed
depths of mortal thought, mood, aim, appetite, right,
duty, kindness, savagery ; and yet how stable lan-
guage is, and how immutably the tongues of leading
stocks in the world seem to have struck their roots.
Then consider the three great faiths — Christendom,
Judaism, Islam, — in spite of endless reformation,
counter-reformation, internecine conflict within,
displacements by fire and sword from without. Yet
if we survey the far-stretching cosmorama of re-
ligions in their vast history, how steadfastly the
name, the rites, the practices, and traditions, and
intense attachment to them all, persist even after
reasoning and comparative methods seem to have
plucked up or worn away the dogrriatic roots.
Progress On one thing, at any rate, optimist and pessimist
automa- agree, that progress is no automaton, spontaneous
and self-propelling. It depends on the play of
forces within the community and external to it.
It depends on the room left by the State for the
enterprise, energy, and initiative of the individual.
It depends on the absence from the general mind at a
given time, of the sombre feeling, Quota pars omnium
sumus, how small a fraction is a man's share in the
huge universe of unfathomable things. It depends
on no single element in| social being, but on the

no
aui
ton.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 93

confluence of many tributaries in a great tidal stream
of history ; and those tides, like the ocean itself,
ebbing and flowing in obedience to the motions of
an inconstant moon. Though Greek is not com-
pulsory with you here, we may go back for the
last poetic word on all this, to the ode in the Greek
play where the chorus recounts with glorious
enumeration how of all the many wonders of the
world, the most wondrous is Man ; he makes a
path across the white sea, works the land, captures
or tames animals and birds for his daily use ; he
has devised language and from language thought,
and all the moods that mould a State ; he finds a
help against every evil of his lot, save only death ;
against death and the grave he has no power. No
progress, at any rate, in harmony of words or
strength of imagination in the four-and-twenty
centuries since Sophocles, dims the force and beauty
of these ancient lines.1

VIII

The Italian Machiavel of the fifteenth century is ;' The state
applauded by a German Machiavel of the nineteenth,
for disclosing and impressing the mighty funda-
mental that "the State is Force" We call
Treitschke and Machiavelli by a common name
without offence, because both writers have the signal

1 Antigone, 332-64. Jebb, p. 76.

94 POLITICS AND HISTORY

courage and rare merit to proclaim what each of
them takes for rigid and relentless truth. Kulers,
they say, may be shy of owning that the State is
Force, and the more respectable or the weaker
among them do their best to find a decent veil. Still
things are what they are, and the politic augur does
not deceive himself. Political right and wrong
depends on the practice of your age, and on what is
done by other people. Machiavelli did notgo beyond
common sense when he " saw no reason for fighting
with foils against men who fight with poniards."
in what We all know, to be sure, that in one vital sense
the State is Force. Yet as a bare primordial law of
social existence, experience shows how easily it falls
into frightfully misleading disproportion. Carlyle
brought it to a startling point, when he declared
that after all the fundamental question between
any two human beings is, " Can I kill thee, or canst
thou kill me ? " But is the main truth actually
this, that brutality, whether naked or in uniform
and peruke, is the fundamental postulate between
rulers and ruled, or between governments and
nations on the two sides of a frontier ? The
judge, the constable, the sheriff, as we know well
enough, are indispensable against foes within, and
the soldier with his rifle for foes across the frontier.
Still the principle is no beacon-fire, until we have
vigilantly explored it. What sort of State, what
sort of Force ? What is to be the place of the

POLITICS AND HISTORY 95

Minister of Police in internal government ? Is
there to be a jury of twelve honest men in a
box, and a writ of habeas corpus, and no privilege
conceded to an official of the State against the
civil rights of ordinary citizens ? The formula of
force would not have been rejected, so far as it
goes, by William the Silent, Cromwell, Turgot,
Washington, Lincoln, or any other of the small host
who pass for mankind's political deliverers. It would
have been silently accepted, if they had stooped to
theorize, by the most barbarous tyrants in modern
history, from Ezzelino in the thirteenth century,
down to King Bomba in the nineteenth. There
is no more revolting chapter in the annals of
Christendom than the Spanish Inquisition. Yet it
was in fact a definite branch of the State, and at an
auto-da-fe any Familiar with a conscience might
have murmured, as he heaped the faggots round his
firm-souled victim, that after all the State is Force.
So, too, the Jacobin with his guillotine.

Manifold are the types of State and the condi-
tions of the Force, — by whom, for instance, and on
what terms it is wielded. The maxim does not
harden into a doctrine fit for use, until in a given
case we know of the force, what are its instruments
and origins, the nature of its energies. What is the
power of its action for social stability on the one hand,
and social motion, whether forward or backward, on
the other ? How stands it towards opinion and law,

96 POLITICS AND HISTORY

the two great agencies of government ? Above all,
let us know what price it costs, when the full and final
for balance has been struck. Cavour, to whom a foremost

ideas before

cannon. place is not denied by any of the writers of this school
of Force, used to talk of " people like me who
t have more faith in ideas than in cannon for mending
the lot of humanity." Yet not Stein nor any of
the builders of Germany had less patience with the
abstractions of Metapolitics, — the counterpart in
theories on government, to Metaphysics in specula-
tion upon Being, — than had the first effective
builder of Italy. The ideas in which he had faith,
were ideas with practical aims tested by open dis-
cussion. With uncriticized bureaucracy called to
no account by those over whom it is set, he had as
little sympathy as with metapolitics. Bureaucracy
has not to persuade, to compromise, to give and
take, to prove and win its case in the course of
free personal debate in face of rival ideas and
antagonistic interests. Believed from these whole-
some exigencies, it may carry and enforce measures
efficiently, but with too little security that time
will prove them right. And who that has watched
bureaucracy at close quarters, witt deny that
it is in fact more cumbrous, dilatory, and depress-
ing for a people's political energy — and not any
less so to those who work it — than that discus-
sion in a representative assembly, which is the

1 Scritti, ii. 225.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 97

salutary substitute. Such a system Cavour from his
heart distrusted. He was the man of parliaments,
constitutional minister, murmuring on his deathbed
against absolute power and state of siege.

Bismarck was a giant of the older well- Bismarck
known type, working through imposed authority
and armed force. Before he made war, first on
Austria, next on France, he declared war upon his
parliament. " I recognize no authority save that
of his Majesty the King, I oppose all attacks aimed
at the sovereignty of the monarch, like bronze or
granite." That the maxim of the State being
Force does not carry us magisterially through the
more subtle and delicate branches of national
business, this powerful man was rapidly to learn
from his rude encounter with the Church from
1875 to 1878. The famous Culturkampf, or fight
for modern civilization, for obvious reasons is no
favourite topic in Germany, but it is one of the most
striking episodes in the deepest conflict of our time.
The motives of its author are obscure, — whether,
like France and Belgium, he meant it for a counter
to the Vatican Council; or a stroke against the
Poles and Catholic particularismus in southern
Germany ; or a searching test of imperial unity ; or
an iron-handed sequel to Luther and Germanism
against the Tiara beyond the mountains. Be this
as it may, after a grand parliamentary drama the
repulse was severe. " To Canossa," he said, re-

H

98 POLITICS AND HISTORY

"x

calling the mighty struggle between the Emperor
and Hildebrand, " I will not go Cither in flesh or
spirit." Yet in five years to Canossa Bismarck
figuratively went, though without the three peni-
tential days under falling snows in the Canossa
courtyard, where a German prince eight hundred
years before had bent before an ecclesiastic as
daring, immovable, and potent as Prince Bismarck
himself. To find that miscalculated provocation
has ended in reducing your bills to a dead letter ;
and rallying a strong and permanent parlia-
mentary force, was an enduring humiliation that
held a lesson.

influence Though the Middle Age is over, though no
Authority. Hildebrand nor Innocent can now survive, yet
Influence retains a share of the power so long
upheld by the bolder pretensions of Authority.
Well may the Roman Church be described as the
most wonderful structure that " the powers of
human mind and soul, and all the elemental forces
at mankind's disposal have yet reared " (Acton).
Here we meet a branch of politics that only too
plainly deserves attention from those who care in
the fullest sense to comprehend the problems of
their time. History has brought the relation of
spiritual power and temporal into many aspects
and bearings all over Europe. It touches vivid
controversies on schools, religious congregations,
endowments, churches, " exalting their mitred

POLITICS AND HISTORY

front in court and parliament," and is not likely
soon to disappear. It is not for me here to do
more than glance at it. I will not linger on Erastus,
the Heidelberg doctor of ill-omened name, who
in the sixteenth century propounded (or did not
propound) the doctrine of the supremacy of the
civil magistrate in things ecclesiastical, that raises
many violent disputations in relation to English
and Scotch establishment.1 The Erastian prin-
ciple has been greatly transformed in the United
Kingdom in the last sixty years, and further trans-
formations await it. The internal temper and
spirit of the Church of England has undergone
immense changes within the same period, and to
what extent these internal changes have altered
the value set upon secular privilege, either by her
members or in external opinion, remains an active
issue.

However that may stand, the Koman Church, for
good or for evil, has in itself qualities of a State that
do not belong even to the most vigorous and exclu-
sive of Protestant communions. A famous French
writer, a Piedmontese statesman of the Napoleonic
age, wrote a book in 1817 upon the Pope, de-
nning and vindicating the papal sovereignty, in
the same temper and on the same lines as the
Machiavellian school in the area of State. De

1 See The Thesis of Erastus touching Excommunication, by
Rev. Robert Lee, Edinburgh, 1844.

100 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Spiritual Maistre has been styled one of the Vatican's
organized praetorian guard. In his dogmatic fixity, his poor
opinion of mankind, his hatred of all individual
claim, his readiness to shape an argument in
anger, that tells and hits the mark without wound-
ing— this most brilliant of all theocrats recalls
many a chapter of the indomitable Treitschke. If
there were time, an illuminating comparison might
be worked out between them.1 Like some of the
greatest pontiffs whose power he exalted, he was
that compound of the profound mystic with man
of the world, which often causes us so much sur-
prise— unreasonable and unconsidered, for few com-
pounds are more common even in a rationalistic age.
I only name DeMaistre, because it is always anadvan-
tage to have theories systematically set out ; and his
initial proposition that infallibility in the spiritual
j order, and sovereignty in the temporal order are
pure synonyms, is a useful warning to those who
suppose that the principle of the State being Force
is a conclusive, satisfying, comprehensive formula,
finally summing up the case of civilized government.
His argument is simple. Any organized society
demands a government. On various grounds, in
the organized Catholicism of Rome, that govern-
ment must be a monarchy, and being infallible it
must be absolute over all such as choose to remain

1 A piece upon De Maistre is to be found in my Critical
Miscellanies (ed. of 1886), vol. ii.

POLITICS AND HISTORY 101

its subjects, — subjects called by the kinder name of
children. In imposing such force as he commands
upon remonstrants, the pontiff will be careful to avoid
collision with domestic laws of temporal sovereigns,
just as Prince Bismarck found out that they will
be wise to avoid collision with him. Treitschke's
doctrine provoked plenty of antagonism in the
temporal world, and the corresponding way of deal-
ing with spiritual sovereignty has not been approved
by all who find repose or shelter within the Roman
fold. Nothing, say eminent men among them, can be
more remote from the political notions of monarchy
than pontifical authority. That authority is not
the will of the rulers, but the law of the Church,
binding those who have to administer it as strictly
as those who have to obey. Arbitrary power is
made impossible by that prodigious system of
canon law, which is the ripe fruit of the experience
and inspiration of eighteen hundred years.1 So
be it. Yet the attempt by theocratic partisans,
from the majestic Bossuet down to the meagre
Pobedonostzeff in our own day, to insist upon a
difference, whether the government be legitimate
or revolutionary, Prince, Pope, or Demos, between
absolute and arbitrary, tested by demands of
practice is little more than sophistry. You will
be glad to escape to safer and more secular ground,
but these topics are by no means out of date, and

1 Acton, History of Freedom and oilier Essays, 1907, p. 192.

102 POLITICS AND HISTORY

they deserve the interest of intelligent readers of
the newspapers.

cienchers " How vague and cloudy," we are told by good
readers, "were many of the German treatises of the
last 60 years on the theory of the State." Even those
who insist most strongly that the abstract paves the
way for the concrete, that the transcendental is the
only secure basis for order by government, and
that evolution of the Absolute is the right precursor
of Sadowa and Sedan, cannot but admit that in
Germany at least it was the dynasty of historians,
and not the abstract men, who supplied the final
cienchers for public opinion and national resolution.
Treitschke, the most brilliant of the dynasty,
one day fell upon a volume of the letters of
Cavour. Admiring Cavour's clearness of mind,
cheerful simplicity, common sense and measure, he
goes on : " Nothing for a long time has chained my
attention so fast. This intensely practical genius
is of course different by a whole heaven' s-breadth
from the great poets and thinkers that are so
trusted by us Germans. Yet he stands in his own
way before the riddles of the world as great as Goethe
or Kant." After Sadowa Treitschke pronounced
any dragoon who struck down a Croat to have done
more at that moment for the German cause, than
the subtlest political head with the best cut quill.
To such lengths do brilliant men push things in their
humour for Real-Politik and hurrying to be quit of

POLITICS AND HISTORY 103

the abstract. With this writer, reaction went far.1
In an iron age, he urges, — and our age is iron,— to
make peace your steadfast aim, is not only a dream,
but a blind resistance to the supreme law of life that
the strong must overcome the weak. It is a futile
attempt to evade stern facts, it nurses selfishness,
intrigue, material greed, coarse egotism. War is the
greatest school of duty, and to preach against it is
not only foolish, but immoral. Frederick the Great
is right, that war opens the most fruitful field for
all the virtues ; for steadfastness, compassion, for
the lofty soul, the noble heart, for charity ; every
moment in war is an opportunity for one or other
of these virtues. Even duelling is manly discipline
in courage, self-respect, and the principle of honour.
These sanguinary sophistries find resounding
echoes. One recent writer of the school inscribes
for motto on his title-page — " War and brave spirit
have done more great things than love of your neigh-
bour. Not your sympathies, but your stout-hearted
prowess, is what saves the unfortunate." 2 All this
glorification of war, although shining poets of our
own lent to it the genius of their music not so
many years ago, is surely as disastrous an outcome
for the school that presents it, as was Machiavelli's
choice of Caesar Borgia to be the grand example of
his Prince.

1 Politik : Vorlesungen, 2 vols. (1899).
2 Bernhardi, DeutscTiland und der nachste Krieg.

104 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Let us refresh ourselves by recalling the plea
for perpetual peace that came from the pen
of the great German, who died at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, leaving behind him a
fame and influence both as metaphysician and
moralist, that place him among the foremost of all
Kant's his countrymen. Outside of philosophy, he owed
standing * much to Bayle, Rousseau, St. Pierre, above all to
Montesquieu. But he watched the two great affairs
of his time, the revolt of the American Colonies,
and the overthrow of the French monarchy, with
an interest hardly less keen than that of Burke
himself, with whose later views he warmly sym-
pathized. Though supreme in the region of the
abstract, he had mind left for man as a political
creature in the concrete.- His tracts on Cosmo-
political History, inspired from French sources,
in their own day missed fire, nor is his setting 'of
good ideas attractive in its form. It is too dog-
matic, abstract, geometric. That notwithstanding,
the principles of common sense applied to his ideal
of permanent peace in a European federation, are
stated with admirable effect. He points to the
immoderate exhaustion of incessant and long
preparation for war. He presses the evil conse-
quence at last entailed by war, even through the
midst of peace, driving nations to all manner of
costly expedients and experiments. When war
ends, after infinite devastation, ruin, and universal

POLITICS AND HISTORY 105

exhaustion of energy, comes a peace on terms that
plain reason would have suggested from the first.
The remedy is a federal league of nations in
which even the weakest member looks for pro-
tection to the united power, and the adjudication
of the collective will. States, Kant predicts,
must of necessity be driven at last to the
very same resolution to which the savage man of
nature was driven with equal reluctance ; namely
to sacrifice brutish liberty, and to seek peace and
security in a civil constitution founded upon law.
This civil constitution must in each State be
republican, — a point that may have alienated
opinion in monarchical Germany, but in fact it
was not meant to go beyond some one or more of
the many possible shapes of representative govern-
ment. As it has unfortunately happened, neither
republic nor parliament has yet found itself able to
walk in Kant's way, but he marks a bright patch
in dubious skies.

IX

Statesmen are supposed not to take a high view The two
of their fellow-creatures. Mazzini says of the his-
torian of the Council of Trent, "Like most states-
men, Sarpi had no great faith in human nature."
Too narrow a reading of famous Italians of the
age before Sarpi, like Machiavel and Guicciardini,
gives them a worse reputation in this respect than

106 POLITICS AND HISTOEY

they deserve. In England, save in bad periods,
our most politic princes and rulers, though circum-
spect and shrewd, have been no cynics. They
took human nature with wise leniency, though
George III., himself a consummate politician in the
worst sense, declared politics a trade for a rascal,
not for a gentleman. " How goes our educa-
tion business ? " Frederick the Great asked of an
official. "Very well," was the answer; "in old
days, when the notion was that men were naturally
inclined to evil, severity prevailed in schools, but
now when we realize that the inclination of men is
good, schoolmasters are more generous." " Alas,
my dear Sulzer," was Frederick's reply, :c you
don't know that damned race as I do." Even those
who would with truth deny that they looked on
great politics as no more than a game of skill, do
not flatter their human material. Tocqueville, for
political instance, was philosopher, member of parliament,
and foreign secretary. His experience was ample ;
he saw public business and its agents at first hand.
His autobiographic pages are liberally strewn with
allusions to the volatility of men, and to the
emptiness of the great words with which they
cover up their petty passions. Nations are like
men, he said ; they prefer what flatters their
passions to what serves their interests. " I do
not despise the mediocre, but I keep out of their
way, I treat them like commonplaces : I honour

POLITICS AND HISTORY 107

commonplaces, for they lead the world, but they
weary me profoundly." Of Napoleon III. : " It
was his flightiness, rather than his reason, that,
thanks to circumstance, made his success and his
power ; for the world is a curious theatre, and there
are occasions where the worst pieces succeed best."
" I found that it is with the vanity of men you do
most good business, for you often gain very sub-
stantial things from their vanity, while giving little
substance back. You will not do half so well with
their ambition or their cupidity. But then it is
true that to make the best of the vanity of other
people, you must take care to lay aside all your

own."

Tocqueville, however, we must remember,
though in his earlier day he was the approving
critic and skilful analyst of certain forms of demo-
cracy, was well described as an aristocrat who
accepted his defeat. And far less conscientious,
careful, and well-trained thinkers than he, can with
very little trouble lay their hands on weaknesses
of human nature, and therefore of democratic
systems, since they depend for their success on
human nature's strength. As if autocracy, which
had twice ruined the French State in his own life-
time, was free from the duperies that democracy,
still less either landed or plutocrat oligarchy, is not
able wholly to escape. In any system, is not what
Burke said the real truth ? " The true lawgiver

108 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Maxim for ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought
lawgiver, to love and respect mankind, and to fear himself.
. . . Political arrangement, as it is a work for social
ends, is only to be wrought by social means. Mind
must combine with mind. Time is required to
produce that union of minds which alone can
produce all the good we aim at." This was in
keeping with the same great man's dictum, that
in any large public connection of men love of
virtue and detestation of vice always prevail.
To the general truth so broadly stated, history
may demand some qualification, but the manful
proclamation that the true lawgiver ought to love
and respect mankind and fear himself, sets a
cardinal mark of division between two schools
of modern government. Men like Rousseau,
Fichte, Mazzini, Burke, whose eloquence has
wielded supreme influence in the political sphere
within the last 150 years ; or the men like Byron,
Shelley, Burns, and the poets of freedom in con-
tinental Europe, had not much in common with
the sword-bearer of English Puritanism, though
what they had in common was the root of the
matter. Cromwell set the case in famous words :
' What liberty and prosperity depend upon are the
souls of men and the spirits — which are the men.
The mind is the man." Yes, and the historic
epochs that men are most eager to keep in living
and inspiring memory, are the epochs where the

POLITICS AND HISTORY 109

mind that is the man approved itself unconquerable
by force.

What a withering mistake it is if we let indolence
of mood tempt us into regarding all ecclesiastical or Man/
theological dispute as barren wrangles, all political
dispute as egotistic intrigues. Even the common
shades and subdivisions of party — Right, Left, Right
Centre, Left Centre and the rest — are more than
jargon of political faction. They have their roots,
sometimes deep, sometimes very shallow, in varying
sorts of character. In forms hard and narrow, still
if we have candour and patience to dig deep enough,
they mark broad eternal elements in human nature ;
sides taken in the standing quarrels of the world ;
persistent types of sympathy, passion, faith, and
principle, that constitute the fascination, instruc-
tion, and power of command in history.

Everybody who knows anything knows that
it is waste of our short lives to insist on ideal
perfection. Popular government, or any other
for that matter, is no chronometer, with delicate
apparatus of springs, wheels, balances, and escape-
ments. It is a rough heavy bulk of machinery,
that we must get to work as we best can. It goes
by rude force and weight of needs, greedy interests
and stubborn prejudice ; it cannot be adjusted in
an instant, or it may be a generation, to spin and
weave new material into a well-finished cloth. There
is a virtuous and not uninfluential school, and Mill

110 POLITICS AND HISTORY

leaned in their direction, who think that there exists
in every community a grand reserve of wise, thought-
ful, unselfish, long-sighted men and women, who, if
you could only devise electoral machinery ingenious
enough, if they had only parliamentary chance and
power enough, would save the State. That such
a reserve should exist, should acquire and exert its
influence, should spread the light, is felicity indeed.
More than felicity, it is an essential. It must be
the main text of every exhortation to a university.
But this is not to say that the State will be fortified
in its tasks by special electoral artifices, with a
scent of algebra and decimals about them. These
are not easily intelligible either in principle or
working to plain men; they are more likely to
irritate than to appease, to throw grit instead of
oil among the huge rolling shafts and grinding
wheels of public government.

ironies in Some of the most effective actors in the world's
theatre have been, it is true, most sensible of ever-
lasting ironies in the drama. " The most malicious
democrat," Bismarck said, " can have.no idea what
nullity and charlatanry are concealed in diplomacy."
It has somewhere been called the art of passing bad
money. The three contracting parties to the Holy
Alliance — the sinister confederacy that almost
makes one regret Napoleon — attempted three or four
months after Waterloo to bind one another to make
the precepts of the Christian religion, as set forth in

POLITICS AND HISTORY 111

Holy Scripture, the sole guide of their public conduct,
with what edifying results Europe was soon to
learn. In the tortuous negotiations among the
representatives of the Powers before the battle of
Leipzig, it was once proposed deliberately to insert
a false citation. The British representative was
Lord Aberdeen. He electrified his colleagues by
declaring that as a man of honour he would never
sign a he. English diplomatists have not seldom
found themselves in difficulties from the simple,
direct, blunt turn of our average British mind.
They are disposed, as it has been put, to take
words at their face value, while foreign ministers and
publicists of subtler mould and susceptibility, are
apt to read interpretations into our plain words
that in negotiation prove a stumbling-block and
an offence.

Bismarck was fond of an iron ring from St.
Petersburg, with a favourite Russian word inscribed
upon it, nitchevo, — like the corresponding Irish
word that pleased Sir Walter Scott, nabochlish, —
" What does it matter ? " His table-talk, like
Luther's, or Lincoln's, or Cavour's, was coloured by
a satiric humour that it would be foolish to count
for cynicism, scepticism, pessimism, or any other of
that ill-omened family. It was only one of the cheer-
ful tricks of fortitude. Such moods have nothing
in common with Leopardi's poetic gloom over the
hypocrisies of destiny ; or the dare-devil wit of

112 POLITICS AND HISTORY

Don Juan ; or the mockeries of Heine ; least of all
with Swift, — a born politician, if ever there was one,
but one who had no political chance, and avenged
himself by letting irony blacken into savage and
impious misanthropy. Without making the mis-
take of measuring the stature of rulers and leaders
of men by the magnitude of transactions in Miich
they found themselves engaged, none at least of
those who bear foremost names in the history of
nations, ever worked and lived, we may be sure, in
the idea that it was no better than solemn comedy
for which a sovereign demiurgus in the stars had
cast their parts.

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